A Review of Environmental Flow Evaluation Methodologies – Limitations and Validations

Ecological flow in southern Europe: Status and trends in non-perennial rivers

“…These peculiarities together with the scarcity of hydrological and ecological data, which is common for these river systems (Skoulikidis et al, 2017;Tramblay et al, 2020), make it difficult to characterize flow regime and set an E-Flow regime (De Girolamo et al, 2022a). Several critical reviews investigated the methodologies for setting E-Flows (Annear et al, 2002;Arthington et al, 1998;Arthington, 2012;Dyson et al 2003;Dunbar et al, 1998;Hatfield et al, 2013;Jowett et al, 1997;Stalnaker and Arnette, 1976;Pastor et al 2014), their advantages and disadvantages (Acreman and Dunbar, 2004;Arthington, 2012), the historical perspective (Gopal, 2013), their implementation around the world (Tharme, 2003), or in specific areas (Hatfield and Paul, 2015;Linnansaari et al, 2012;Moccia et al, 2020;Sharma et al, 2022;Ramos et al, 2018). However, these studies did neither investigate how the national legislation of the MSs of the Mediterranean Region defined the E-Flows for non-perennial rivers, nor investigate the causes of the delay recorded in the E-Flows implementation and to our best knowledge, no studies relating to case study applications in non-perennial rivers were published.…”