Transferability of hydromorphological assessment methods.

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Friday 3 july 2015

12:45 - 12:48h at South America (level 0)

Themes: (T) Hydro-environment, (ST) Rehabilitation of water systems, Poster pitches

Parallel session: Poster pitches: 15J. Sediment - Basin & Environment - Wetland

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Urban development, water diversion, dams and reservoirs operations have degraded stream morphologic and ecosystem processes by channel straightening, stream bed armoring, polluted waters and limited ecologic diversity. Hydromorpphologic assessments of river systems evaluate the structural and ecological interactions between wide ranges of biophysical processes within the system. Quantification of the geomorphologic and ecologic status of river systems is a vital component for integrated river management. Here, we applied and compared three different methods which are the, LAWA (2002), KIT (2011) and HMID applied to an urban and a rural reaches of Boise River, Idaho, USA. We developed 1-dimentional (1D) hydrodynamic model to simulate flow hydraulic characteristics. The rural study reach provides reference conditions to differentiate the effect of urban development. The study focuses transferability of these methods among the contexts of Europe and Western US. Hydromorphological Index of Diversity (HMID) provides information about the diversity of hydromorpphologic characteristics of river reaches, regardless of geographic region. Our study has shown that the assessment approaches developed for a certain geographic region and contexts may not be applicable to river systems located to other geographic region.