FIrst of all. Congratulations for you good research! but I would like to ask you about a different point of view, the human safety on the river reach affected by hydropeaking. The ecological point of view is well explored by the literature, but I found a huge lack when I had to define the hydropeaking operation for a river where the major concern was people safety (people uses the river for laundry, recreational purposes and fishing). Have your research group developed some work on that? Or do you have some literature/experience to share?Thanks in advance.

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 June 13, 2016 16:47 by Andreas Bruder, Senior Scientist at SUPSI - University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland

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