19. Setting Limits To Hydrologic Alteration

2019 ◽  
pp. 273-286
Author(s):  
Gražina ŽIBIENĖ ◽  
Alvydas ŽIBAS ◽  
Goda BLAŽAITYTĖ

The construction of dams in rivers negatively affects ecosystems because dams violate the continuity of rivers, transform the biological and physical structure of the river channels, and the most importantly – alter the hydrological regime. The impact on the hydrology of the river can occur through reducing or increasing flows, altering seasonality of flows, changing the frequency, duration and timing of flow events, etc. In order to determine the extent of the mentioned changes, The Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration (IHA) software was used in this paper. The results showed that after the construction of Angiriai dam, such changes occurred in IHA Parameters group as: the water conditions of April month decreased by 31 %; 1-day, 3-days, 7-days and 30-days maximum flow decreased; the date of minimum flow occurred 21 days later; duration of high and low pulses and the frequency of low pulses decreased, but the frequency of high pulses increased, etc. The analysis of the Environmental Flow Components showed, that the essential differences were recorded in groups of the small and large floods, when, after the establishment of the Šušvė Reservoir, the large floods no longer took place and the probability of frequency of the small floods didn’t exceed 1 time per year.


2013 ◽  
Vol 503 ◽  
pp. 196-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Homa ◽  
Casey Brown ◽  
Kevin McGarigal ◽  
Bradley W. Compton ◽  
Scott D. Jackson

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Dudgeon

River ecosystems in monsoonal Asia are experiencing human impacts to the detriment of the rich biodiversity they support. Threats include hydrologic alteration, pollution, habitat destruction, overexploitation, and invasive exotic species. Global warming will cause further changes to river ecosystems, and may act synergistically with other threat factors. Significant upward or northward range adjustments by the freshwater biota will be necessary to cope with rising temperatures, but there will be significant constraints upon dispersal ability and availability of suitable habitat for many organisms. Global warming will exacerbate existing impacts of hydrologic alteration because of the adaptive human responses that will be engendered by changes in climate and runoff, particularly dams constructed for hydropower generation, flood protection, water storage, and irrigation. The consequences of further hydrologic alteration and habitat fragmentation will be profound, since almost all ecological processes, material transfers and life-cycle events in the rivers of monsoonal Asia are mediated or controlled by flow. Thus a change in the timing or amounts of flow changes everything. Collaborative research to determine the environmental allocation of water flow needed to maintain ecosystem integrity and sustain biodiversity in the human-dominated rivers of monsoonal Asia should be a priority for ecologists, engineers and water-resource managers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (7) ◽  
pp. 686-696 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junxiang Cheng ◽  
Ligang Xu ◽  
Xiaolong Wang ◽  
Jiahu Jiang ◽  
Hailin You

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesc Gallart ◽  
Núria Cid ◽  
Pilar Llorens ◽  
Jérôme Latron ◽  
Núria Bonada ◽  
...  

<p>Water courses that recurrently cease to flow represent a large part of drainage networks, and are expected to expand with global warming and increased exploitation of water resources. Common classifications of the regime of these temporary streams are based on the statistics of zero flow events. This is partly practical because these statistics can be obtained from flow records or model simulations and the results can be used for some environmental regulations or management purposes.</p><p>Nevertheless, it is well known that the main hydrological control on riverine aquatic life is the presence-absence of water rather than its flow regime. Disconnected pools that frequently remain in temporary streams after flow cessation provide valuable refuges for aquatic life, which can last up to all year round. An operational characterisation of the hydrological regime of temporary streams useful for ecological purposes must therefore take into account at least the three main aquatic phases that they undergo: flow, disconnected pools and dry stream bed. However, gauging stations and the derived hydrological models may only marginally inform about the possible occurrence of disconnected pools after the cessation of flow.</p><p>In order to facilitate the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive to the temporary streams, an operational approach has been developed to describe and classify the regime of temporary streams and to assess their degree of hydrologic alteration, relevant to aquatic life. This approach is encapsulated in the freely available TREHS software. The first step of this approach is the gathering of information on the frequency of the three aquatic phases using diverse sources of information, such as flow records and simulations, <em>in situ</em> observations, interpretation of aerial or terrestrial series of photographs, and interviews with local inhabitants or technicians familiar with the riverine systems. Up to six metrics describing these frequencies and their temporal patterns of occurrence are used to determine the natural and observed stream regime, and to assess the degree of hydrological alteration.</p><p>The combination of the complementary frequencies of the three main aquatic phases allows the description of the regime of every stream as a point in a ternary plot, where the three vertices of the triangle represent the perennial streams, the perennial pools and the terrestrial systems, respectively. This ternary plot assists the classification of the regime of any stream that takes into account the statistics of the main proxies of the occurrence of aquatic habitats. The TREHS software also provides a classification of the regimes in the ternary plot that groups the regimes of assumed ecological significance and uses terms that are conflict-free from the current classifications. Furthermore, TREHS users can easily define new regime classes in this plot according to the ecohydrological characteristics of their streams.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (23) ◽  
pp. 10030
Author(s):  
Verônica Léo ◽  
Hersília Santos ◽  
Letícia Pereira ◽  
Lilia Oliveira

The demand for freshwater resources and climate change pose a simultaneous threat to rivers. Those impacts are often analyzed separately, and some human impacts are widely evaluated in river dynamics—especially in downstream areas rather than the consequences of land cover changes in headwater reaches. The distinction between anthropogenic and climate on the components of the flow regime is proposed here for an upstream free dam reach whose watershed is responsible for the water supply in Rio de Janeiro. Indicators of hydrologic alteration (IHA) and the range of variability approach (RVA) combined with statistical analyses of anthropogenic and climate parameters indicated that (1) four river flow components (magnitude, frequency, duration, and rate of change) were greatly altered from the previous period (1947 to 1967) and the actual (1994 to 2014); (2) shifts in the sea surface temperature of the Atlantic correlated with flow magnitude; (3) the cattle activity effects on the flow regime of the studied area decreased 42.6% of superficial discharge; global climate change led to a 10.8% reduction in the same river component. This research indicated that climate change will impact the intensification of human actions on rivers in the southeast Brazilian headwaters.


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