For 30 years Australian research groups built channels along a 2075-kilometre stretch of the Murray River so fish could swim all the way from the mouth in Goolwa, South Australia, to Lake Hume.

The channels are called fishways or fish ladders and help migratory river dwelling species to bypass shallow waters and man-made obstacles.

Charles Sturt University Institute for Land Water and Society fish ecologist Lee Baumgarten said the Murray project had been a roaring success.

“We've already recorded many species of Murray fish that are now migrating over hundreds of kilometres since the fishways have been switched on,” he said.

“In 2014, we completed the last fish ladder.”

For the last 10 years Dr Baumgarten has also been involved in a project which is trying to translate the Murray River concept to the Mekong River in Laos and recently received $1.7 million from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research.

Dr Baumgarten said the rice industry in the South East Asian country had meant that regulators were built to stop the river from flooding rice fields in the wet season, with the issue being it stops the migration of a large variety of fish species.

Dr Baumgarten said there were 177 fish species.

He helped establish the first fishway in Laos and is set to fly out on Friday to start work on researching just how effective the measure has been.

The use of microchips to track fish is one of the measures used in the Murray tht is set to be trialled in Laos this year.