Identifying effective reservoir capacity, water supply, inflow for tradeoff between human and ecological demand

Abstract

To protect the river ecosystem and sustain ecological flow regime, it’s vital to consider environmental flow management in reservoir operation. Many researches try to use more detailed environmental flow management strategies to improve ecological flow regime. However, ecological flow regime not only is influenced by environmental flow management strategy, but also by three kinds of parameters, including reservoir capacity, reservoir inflow and water supply yield. The aim of this paper is to illustrate how ecological flow regime is affected by different reservoir capacities, reservoir inflows and water supply yields and to find a proper reservoir capacity, reservoir inflow or water supply yield under which the optimal ecological flow regime is the best and could not be improved. In this paper, an environmental flow management strategy, which is Four-period release approach (FP), is developed. Besides, social benefit and ecosystem needs are satisfied simultaneously. The results show that changing reservoir capacity, reservoir inflow or water supply yield could improve ecological flow regime.