2022 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Virtual Conference

March 13 - 15, 2022

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5/21/2019  |   2:15 PM - 2:30 PM   |  THE CHANGING PULSE OF RIVERS: DAM-INDUCED ALTERATION OF FLOW PERIODICITY AND SYNCHRONY   |  251 DE

THE CHANGING PULSE OF RIVERS: DAM-INDUCED ALTERATION OF FLOW PERIODICITY AND SYNCHRONY

Phenological dynamics are controlled by seasonal patterns in riverine hydrology. Well known examples include how flow regimes cue the onset of fish migration and spawning, elicit seed release by riparian plants, and trigger insect emergence. So, should we be concerned about dams that do everything from dampening flow seasonality (storage operations) to inducing rapid, periodic fluctuations in flow (hydropower operations)? Here, we used the wavelet transform to quantify how dams have affected scales of flow variability for hundreds of rivers across the United States. According to mean daily discharge, we found that natural yearly and/or seasonal flow periodicity was largely dampened during post-dam periods due to reservoir storage. Cross-wavelet analysis according to 15-min discharge data revealed large-scale spatial synchrony in flow regimes that emerged as a consequence of seasonality at ‘natural’ time-scales and dam management at ‘artificial’ time-scales. Both the loss of flow seasonality and the emergence of novel signals at human-relevant-scales (e.g. 1-day, 1-week) represent important alterations to the natural flow regime. This work advances the notion that dams alter high-level properties of flow regimes, thus having important implications for organismal phenology both today and in the future.

  • Conservation
  • Flood
  • Hydrology

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Presenters/Authors

Julian Olden (), University of Washington, olden@uw.edu;


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Albert Ruhi (), Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California Berkeley, albert.ruhi@berkeley.edu;


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