Dear Marcus, Thank you for your interest in our work. What we find is that the details of ecological impacts are not well researched, in terms of species traits most affected, threshold of harm, interacting stressors, etc. But you're right, probably human safety issues are even less explored, or assumed to be not an issue at the intensities of hydropeaking seen in Europe. My approach would be to define metrics of harm for the human uses you describe, which could reflect discharge maxima, response time of people, the effects of warning systems etc. Together they will define acceptable hydropeaking for human risk. This could be compared to acceptable hydropeaking for ecology. If you want to do this objectively, you could use aggregation tools like multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), See for a methodological description (in particular Fig. 3 in this paper which exemplifies the combination of very different mitigation goals): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479715001140 I hope this helps, thanks for the kind discussion.Andi
Published by Andreas Bruder, Senior Scientist at SUPSI - University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland
Dear Marcus, Thank you for your interest in our work. What we find is that the details of ecological impacts are not well researched, in terms of species traits most affected, threshold of harm, interacting stressors, etc.
But you're right, probably human safety issues are even less explored, or assumed to be not an issue at the intensities of hydropeaking seen in Europe.
My approach would be to define metrics of harm for the human uses you describe, which could reflect discharge maxima, response time of people, the effects of warning systems etc. Together they will define acceptable hydropeaking for human risk. This could be compared to acceptable hydropeaking for ecology. If you want to do this objectively, you could use aggregation tools like multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), See for a methodological description (in particular Fig. 3 in this paper which exemplifies the combination of very different mitigation goals): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479715001140
I hope this helps, thanks for the kind discussion.Andi
But you're right, probably human safety issues are even less explored, or assumed to be not an issue at the intensities of hydropeaking seen in Europe.
My approach would be to define metrics of harm for the human uses you describe, which could reflect discharge maxima, response time of people, the effects of warning systems etc. Together they will define acceptable hydropeaking for human risk. This could be compared to acceptable hydropeaking for ecology. If you want to do this objectively, you could use aggregation tools like multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), See for a methodological description (in particular Fig. 3 in this paper which exemplifies the combination of very different mitigation goals): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479715001140
I hope this helps, thanks for the kind discussion.Andi