2022 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Virtual Conference

March 13 - 15, 2022

6/06/2017 | 9:15 AM - 9:30 AM | Assessment of environmental flow scenarios using state-transition models | 302C

Assessment of environmental flow scenarios using state-transition models

A large number of methods have been developed to assessment environmental flow requirements for rivers. Most methods are based on models of hydrologic time-series rather than models of the ecological endpoints. Important limitations that arise from this include 1) an inability to represent the state-dependency of response to future conditions, 2) the inability to predict actual states through time under some hypothesized future flow regime, and 3) limited sensitivity to compare flow scenarios with similar return intervals of ecologically important events, but different sequencing of those events. Here we present a simple state-transition modelling approach to assess differences in ecological responses to alternative sequences of floodplain inundation events in a large lowland river system. Our approach explicitly incorporates the state-dependency of response to flooding, thereby representing the influences of both antecedent conditions and current population status. Our approach captures the influence of the entire historical sequence of flow events via a first-order Markov chain process. We use prior data and expert opinion to determine state-transitions for a broad suite of ecological indicators. The outputs from the models are testable, and the approach is readily extensible to incorporate additional complexity.

C36 Water Resource Management
S24 Towards a predictive freshwater ecology: using time-series data to understand and forecast responses to a changing environment
S31 Moving forward in flow ecology: identifying and testing key hypotheses

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Presenters/Authors

Nick Bond (), La Trobe University, n.bond@latrobe.edu.au;