Setting an ecological flow regime in a Mediterranean basin with limited data availability: The Locone River case study (S-E Italy)

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

“…HL_Ms resulted the most commonly used approaches in the selected case studies (Fig. 4) (Acuña et al 2020;Aguilar and Polo, 2016;Belmar et al 2010;Godinho et al, 2014;Leone et al, 2023;Palau and Alcázar, 2010;Papadaki et al 2017;Papadaki et al, 2014;Portela, 2008;Sanz and Atienzar, 2018;Sanz and de Jalón, 1997;Theodoropoulos et al, 2018a, b). This is due to the fact that HL_Ms are easy to apply because they are based only on the analysis of the flow time series, and they don't require biological data.…”

“…When hydrological data are not available, continuous models are generally used to reconstruct long-term daily flow. In the analysed case studies, the hydrological models such as Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) (Acuña et al 2020;Leone et al, 2023;Papadaki et al 2020;Papadaki et al 2017), Water Integrated Management for Mediterranean Watersheds model (WiMMED) (Alguilar and Polo, 2016), MIKE SHE hydrological model (Patsialis et al, 2014 and Integrated System for Rainfall-Runoff Modelling (SIMPA) (Sanz and Atienza, 2018) were used (Table 3). H_M was applied to a non-perennial river only in a case study (Bernardo and Alves, 1999), meanwhile two applications of a C_M were found (Papadaki et al, 2020;Stamou et al, 2018).…”

“…Finally, following the holistic ELOHA method, E-Flows should be set by choosing an ecologically acceptable range of variability of each indicator. Leone et al (2023) apply the same HL_M, based on the most representative IHAs of the temporary river Locone (i.e., zero-days, 90-day min). In both Italian case studies, the variability of each IHA was set between the 25th and 75th percentiles.…”

“…The natural dry condition, which occurs from July to September, should be maintained in the Locone river. Acuña et al (2020) and Leone et al (2023) strongly suggested that natural dry conditions should be safeguarded and considered when setting the E-Flows based on the Paradigm of natural flows (Poff et al, 1997), as suggested by the Italian legislation (Decree D.D. STA 30/2017 (MATTM, 2017)).…”

Design of Ecological Flow (E-Flow) Considering Watershed Status Using Watershed and Physical Habitat Models

“…The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), a semi-distributed long-term simulation model, is globally applied to gain insights into hydrology-driven ecological processes, and it can be used as an ecohydrological model [26][27][28]. The reason SWAT can play this role is because it can consider the overall watershed status.…”