Abstract
Water transfers have been implemented globally as important and effective ecological restoration tools over the last several decades. However, the periodic impacts of large-scale ecological water transport projects (EWTP) on ecohydrological systems have been neglected. In this study, wavelet analysis was used to evaluate the effect of flow regimes of EWTPs on the dynamics of ecohydrological systems through real data from a megaproject in the Tarim River basin, China. The results reveal that comparing with natural stream, the restoration flow exhibits seasonal periodicities in the winter instead of flood season, and exhibits unstable yearly periodicities. These characteristics created a distinct groundwater dynamics, which are not coincident with the growth rhythm of riparian vegetation. To optimize the EWTP, two designed flow schemes based on the time lags between flow and vegetation growth which was estimated using the wavelet analysis at seasonal and annual scales were proposed to improve the ecosystem restoration efficiency. The NARX network was used to predict the ecological restoration result. The predicting results show an up to 40% increase comparing to original restoration flow with the same total water volume. These results provide a new insight on ecohydrological system dynamics under EWTP from the periodic perspective, and also quantitatively prove that the designed flows based on wavelet analysis can improve ecosystem restoration efficiency in EWTPs. The methodologies used in this research are mathematical rigorous and can be widely applied to other EWTPs.
Published Version
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