Publication Details |
| Category | Text Publication |
| Reference Category | Journals |
| DOI | 10.3389/fenvs.2022.874065 |
Licence  |
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| Title (Primary) | Editorial: Reconciling small hydropower and ecosystem services in river basins |
| Author | Basso, S.; Bakken, T.H. |
| Source Titel | Frontiers in Environmental Science |
| Year | 2022 |
| Department | CATHYD |
| Volume | 10 |
| Page From | art. 874065 |
| Language | englisch |
| Topic | T5 Future Landscapes |
| Keywords | Small hydropower; Hydropeaking; Sustainable tradeoffs; habitat preference; multi-criteria; Water allocation; Hydro-ecological alteration; Macroinvertebrate; River network; ecosystem services |
| Abstract | Two studies examine different facets of riverine ecology. Negro et al. review the current knowledge of physical habitat preferences of more than thirty freshwater fish species which populate Italian rivers. They find scarce information for one third of them, especially for the most threatened endemic species during the critical spawning period. An exemplary application of the collected information by means of a mesoscale habitat simulation model demonstrate their value for predicting fish distribution in a hydropower impacted river reach. Aksamit et al. experimentally analyze the response of drifting and benthic macroinvertebrate communities to consecutive hydropeaking events generated by a small hydropower installation. Unexpectedly, they find that macroinvertebrate abundance and composition do not vary between peaks, but considerable differences in the drift were found between pools and riffles. Their findings stress the danger linked to direct application of results from flume investigations and call for more on-site experiments and monitoring.Two further studies document how the selection of alternative methodological approaches and multicriteria assessment tools can lead to different conclusions regarding design and development of small hydropower projects. Vassoney et al. compare several established multi-criteria decision making techniques, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, assessing the robustness of their rankings to varying weighting coefficients and evaluating how the choice of a specific methodology may affect the final decision. Perona et al. investigate the hydro-ecological and energy efficiency of variable environmental flows, signaling that the choice and aggregation method of different hydrological and fish habitat indicators strongly affect the overall performance of water allocation policies. Their study also emphasizes the specificity of small run-of-river versus large hydropower with reservoirs, revealing that the unquestioning adoption of widely-accepted methodologies to quantify hydrological alteration developed for the latter leads to biased selection of optimal distribution policies for small run-of-river hydropower.The complex nature of the alterations induced by small hydropower on riverine dynamics and the intricacy of identifying effective solutions which accounts for manifold objectives demand for the joint contribution of several disciplines to improve environmental performance, which will further affect public perception (Venus et al., 2020) and acceptance of this form of renewable energy production. |
| Persistent UFZ Identifier | https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=25820 |
| Basso, S., Bakken, T.H. (2022): Editorial: Reconciling small hydropower and ecosystem services in river basins Front. Environ. Sci. 10 , art. 874065 10.3389/fenvs.2022.874065 |
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