Modeling Flow-Ecology Responses in the Anthropocene: Challenges for Sustainable Riverine Management

Abstract

Climate change will increase water stress in many regions placing greater pressures on rivers to meet human and ecological water needs. Managing rivers experiencing water stress requires a fundamental understanding of how ecosystem processes and functions respond to natural and anthropogenic drivers of flow variability and change. The field of environmental flows meets this need by defining "flow-ecology" relationships-mathematical models linking ecological characteristics and dynamics to the underlying flow regime. However, because these relationships are most often based on historical hydrologic regimes, they implicitly assume climatic stationarity. A fundamental challenge in the Anthropoc..