Identifying effective reservoir capacity, water supply, inflow for tradeoff between human and ecological demand

He Shan,Yin Xin’An,Zhifeng Yang

doi:10.1051/matecconf/201824601034

Abstract

To protect the river ecosystem and sustain ecological flow regime, it’s vital to consider environmental flow management in reservoir operation. Many researches try to use more detailed environmental flow management strategies to improve ecological flow regime. However, ecological flow regime not only is influenced by environmental flow management strategy, but also by three kinds of parameters, including reservoir capacity, reservoir inflow and water supply yield. The aim of this paper is to illustrate how ecological flow regime is affected by different reservoir capacities, reservoir inflows and water supply yields and to find a proper reservoir capacity, reservoir inflow or water supply yield under which the optimal ecological flow regime is the best and could not be improved. In this paper, an environmental flow management strategy, which is Four-period release approach (FP), is developed. Besides, social benefit and ecosystem needs are satisfied simultaneously. The results show that changing reservoir capacity, reservoir inflow or water supply yield could improve ecological flow regime.

Highlights

The protection of environmental flows (e-flows) has been an important part that cannot be ignored in reservoir operation (Vogel et al, 2007; Rheinheimer et al, 2015)
To give more information about this topic, we study the effect of reservoir capacity, inflow discharge and water supply on ecological flow regime
From Tennant’s opinion, 10% of average daily flow (ADF) is recommended as the minimum instantaneous flow to sustain short-term survival habitat and 30% ADF is recommended as a base flow to sustain good habitat for most aquatic species

Summary

Introduction

The protection of environmental flows (e-flows) has been an important part that cannot be ignored in reservoir operation (Vogel et al, 2007; Rheinheimer et al, 2015). The building of dam causes great changes in hydrologic and ecological conditions from natural condition in downstream river (Petts, 2009). The protection of rivers needs to remain minimum eflows, and need to consider ecological flow regime from five aspects: magnitude, timing, duration, frequency, or rate of change of hydrologic flows (Richter and Thomas, 2007). Many research considers ecological flow regime as the mainly optimization objectives to sustain downstream riverine ecosystem healthy. To balance human needs and ecosystem healthy, researchers always take more detailed e-flow management strategies and believe they could make better ecological flow regime (Yin et al, 2011). To sustain ecological flow regime, people commit to study how to detail e-flow management strategies

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion