Integrating water management, habitat modelling and water quality at basin scale environmental flow assessment - Tormes River (Spain)

"This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Hydrological Sciences Journal on 2014, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2013.821573"Multidisciplinary models are useful for integrating different disciplines when addressing water planning and management problems. We combine water resources management, water quality and habitat analysis tools that were developed with the Decision Support System AQUATOOL at a basin scale. The water management model solves the allocation problem through network flow optimisation and considers the environmental flows in some river stretches. Once volumes and flows are estimated, the water quality model is applied. Furthermore, the flows are evaluated from an ecological perspective by using time series of aquatic species habitat indicators. This approach was applied in the Tormes River Water System, where agricultural demands jeopardise the environmental needs of the river ecosystem. Additionally, water quality problems in the lower part of the river result from wastewater loading and agricultural pollution. Our methodological framework can be used to define water management rules that maintain water supply, aquatic ecosystem and water quality legal standards. The integration of ecological and water management criteria in a software platform with objective criteria and heuristic optimisation procedures allows for the realistic assessment and application of environmental flows. Here, we improve the general methodological framework by assessing the hydrological alteration of selected environmental flow regime scenarios.This study was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the SCARCE project [Consolider-Ingenio 2010 CSD2009-00065].Paredes Arquiola, J.; Solera Solera, A.; Martinez-Capel, F.; Momblanch Benavent, A.; Andreu Álvarez, J. (2014). Integrating water management, habitat modelling and water quality at basin scale environmental flow assessment - Tormes River (Spain). Hydrological Sciences Journal. 59(3-4):878-889. https://doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2013.821573S878889593-4Acreman, M. (2005). Linking science and decision-making: features and experience from environmental river flow setting. Environmental Modelling & Software, 20(2), 99-109. doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2003.08.019Andreu, J., Capilla, J., & Sanchís, E. (1996). AQUATOOL, a generalized decision-support system for water-resources planning and operational management. Journal of Hydrology, 177(3-4), 269-291. doi:10.1016/0022-1694(95)02963-xBelmar, O., Velasco, J., & Martinez-Capel, F. (2011). Hydrological Classification of Natural Flow Regimes to Support Environmental Flow Assessments in Intensively Regulated Mediterranean Rivers, Segura River Basin (Spain). Environmental Management, 47(5), 992-1004. doi:10.1007/s00267-011-9661-0Bovee, K.D., 1982.A guide to stream habitat analysis using the Instream Flow Incremental Methodology.Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service Instream Flow Information Paper #12.Garcia De Jalon, D. and Lurueña, J., 2000. Estudio para la determinación de caudales mínimos en varios tramos de la cuenca del Tormes y del Alberche (provincia de Ávila). Technical Report of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid for Junta de Castilla y León. (In Spanish)Liu, Y., Gupta, H., Springer, E., & Wagener, T. (2008). Linking science with environmental decision making: Experiences from an integrated modeling approach to supporting sustainable water resources management. Environmental Modelling & Software, 23(7), 846-858. doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2007.10.007Martinez-Capel, F.et al. 2006. Validació biològica del règim de cabals de manteniment definits al pla sectorial de les conques internes de Catalunya en 10 trams fluvials. Technical report of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia for the Agència Catalana de l’Aigua (Generalitat de Catalunya). (In Spanish)Olaya-Marín, E. J., Martínez-Capel, F., Soares Costa, R. M., & Alcaraz-Hernández, J. D. (2012). Modelling native fish richness to evaluate the effects of hydromorphological changes and river restoration (Júcar River Basin, Spain). Science of The Total Environment, 440, 95-105. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2012.07.093Olden, J. D., & Poff, N. L. (2003). Redundancy and the choice of hydrologic indices for characterizing streamflow regimes. River Research and Applications, 19(2), 101-121. doi:10.1002/rra.700Bain, M. B., & Meixler, M. S. (2008). A target fish community to guide river restoration. River Research and Applications, 24(4), 453-458. doi:10.1002/rra.1065Paredes, J., Andreu, J., & Solera, A. (2010). A decision support system for water quality issues in the Manzanares River (Madrid, Spain). Science of The Total Environment, 408(12), 2576-2589. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2010.02.037Paredes-Arquiola, J., Andreu-Álvarez, J., Martín-Monerris, M., & Solera, A. (2010). Water Quantity and Quality Models Applied to the Jucar River Basin, Spain. Water Resources Management, 24(11), 2759-2779. doi:10.1007/s11269-010-9578-zParedes-Arquiola, J.et al. 2011. Implementing environmental flows in complex water resources systems – case study: the Duero river basin, Spain.River Research and Applications, 29, 451–468. doi:10.1002/rra.1617Poff, N. L., Allan, J. D., Bain, M. B., Karr, J. R., Prestegaard, K. L., Richter, B. D., … Stromberg, J. C. (1997). The Natural Flow Regime. BioScience, 47(11), 769-784. doi:10.2307/1313099POFF, N. L., RICHTER, B. D., ARTHINGTON, A. H., BUNN, S. E., NAIMAN, R. J., KENDY, E., … WARNER, A. (2010). The ecological limits of hydrologic alteration (ELOHA): a new framework for developing regional environmental flow standards. Freshwater Biology, 55(1), 147-170. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2427.2009.02204.xSolomon, S.et al. 2007.Climate change 2007: The physical science basis.Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Exploring the key drivers of riparian woodland successional pathways across three European river reaches

"This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Muñoz-Mas, R., V. Garófano-Gómez, I. Andrés-Doménech, D. Corenblit, G. Egger, F. Francés, M.T. Ferreira, et al. 2017. ¿Exploring the Key Drivers of Riparian Woodland Successional Pathways across Three European River Reaches.¿ Ecohydrology 10 (8). Wiley: e1888. doi:10.1002/eco.1888, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/eco.1888. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving."[EN] Climate change and river regulation are negatively impacting riparian vegetation. To evaluate these impacts, process-based models are preferred over data-driven approaches. However, they require extensive knowledge about ecohydrological processes. To facilitate the implementation of such process-based models, the key drivers of riparian woodland successional pathways across three river reaches, in Austria, Portugal, and Spain, were explored, employing two complementary approaches. The principal component analyses highlighted the importance of the physical gradients determining the placement of the succession phases within the riparian and floodplain zones. The generalized additive models revealed that the initial and pioneer succession phases, characteristic of the colonization stage, appeared in areas highly morphodynamic, close in height and distance to the water table, and with coarse substrate, whereas elder phases within the transitional and mature stages showed incremental differences, occupying less dynamic areas with finer substrate. The Austrian site fitted well the current successional theory (elder phases appearing sequentially further up and distant), but at the Portuguese site, the tolerance of the riparian species to drought and flash flood events governed their placement. Finally, at the Spanish site, the patchy distribution of the elder phases was the remnants of formative events that reshaped the river channel. These results highlight the complex relationships between flow regime, channel morphology, and riparian vegetation. The use of succession phases, which rely on the sequential evolution of riparian vegetation as a response to different drivers, may be potentially better reproducible, within numerical process-based models, and transferable to other geographical regions.This work was supported by the IWRM Era-NET Funding Initiative through the RIPFLOW project (references ERACCT-2005-026025, ERA-IWRM/0001/2008, CGL2008-03076-E/BTE), http://www.old.iwrm-net.eu/spip.php, by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the project SCARCE (Consolider¿Ingenio 2010 CSD2009-00065), and by the project ¿Natural and anthropogenic changes in Mediterranean river drainage basins: historical impacts on rivers morphology, sedimentary flows and vegetation¿ of the Spanish MINECO (CGL2013-44917-R). Virginia Garófano-Gómez received a postdoctoral grant from the Université Blaise Pascal (now: Université Clermont Auvergne). Rui Rivaes benefited from a PhD grant (SFRH/BD/52515/2014) sponsored by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) under the FCT PhD programme FLUVIO¿River Restoration and Management. Patricia María Rodríguez González was funded by FCT through an SFRH/BPD/47140/2008 postdoctoral fellowship and through an FCT Investigator Programme grant (IF/00059/2015). The authors also thank all the colleagues and master students who contributed enthusiastically to the field campaigns of this study.Muñoz Mas, R.; Garófano-Gómez, V.; Andrés Doménech, I.; Corenblit, D.; Egger, G.; Francés, F.; Ferreira, M.... (2017). Exploring the key drivers of riparian woodland successional pathways across three European river reaches. Ecohydrology. 10(8):1-19. https://doi.org/10.1002/eco.1888S11910

Random forests to evaluate interspecific interactions in fish distribution models

[EN] Previous research indicated that high predictive performance in species distribution modelling can be obtained by combining both biotic and abiotic habitat variables. However, models developed for fish often only address physical habitat characteristics, thus omitting potentially important biotic factors. Therefore, we assessed the impact of biotic variables on fish habitat preferences in four selected stretches of the upper Cabriel River (E Spain). The occurrence of Squalius pyrenaicus and Luciobarbus guiraonis was related to environmental variables describing biotic interactions (inferred by relationships among fish abundances) and channel hydro-morphological characteristics. Random Forests (RF) models were trained and then validated using independent datasets. To build RF models, the conditional variable importance was used together with the model improvement ratio technique. The procedure showed effectiveness in identifying a parsimonious set of not correlated variables, which minimize noise and improve model performance in both training and validation phases. Water depth, channel width, fine substrate and water-surface gradient were selected as most important habitat variables for both fish. Results showed clear habitat overlapping between fish species and suggest that competition is not a strong factor in the study area.This research has been developed in the framework of the HolRiverMed project (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-275577, Marie Curie Actions, Intra-European Fellowships) and the SCARCE project (Assessing and predicting effects on water quantity and quality in Iberian rivers caused by global change, Consolider-Ingenio 2010 CSD2009-00065). Data collection was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Environment, Rural and Marine Affairs, the Jucar River Basin District Authority and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (POTECOL, CGL2007-66412). We thank Juan Diego Alacaraz-Hernandez, Matias Peredo-Parada and Aina Hernandez-Mascarell for their help with field work and suggestions on data analysis.Vezza, P.; Muñoz Mas, R.; Martinez-Capel, F.; Mouton, A. (2015). Random forests to evaluate interspecific interactions in fish distribution models. Environmental Modelling and Software. 67:173-183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2015.01.005S1731836

Observation of ELVES with Mini-EUSO telescope on board the International Space Station

Mini-EUSO is a detector observing the Earth in the ultraviolet band from the International Space Station through a nadir-facing window, transparent to the UV radiation, in the Russian Zvezda module. Mini-EUSO main detector consists in an optical system with two Fresnel lenses and a focal surface composed of an array of 36 Hamamatsu Multi-Anode Photo-Multiplier tubes, for a total of 2304 pixels, with single photon counting sensitivity. The telescope also contains two ancillary cameras, in the near infrared and visible ranges, to complement measurements in these bandwidths. The instrument has a field of view of 44 degrees, a spatial resolution of about 6.3 km on the Earth surface and of about 4.7 km on the ionosphere. The telescope detects UV emissions of cosmic, atmospheric and terrestrial origin on different time scales, from a few s upwards. On the fastest timescale of 2.5 s, Mini EUSO is able to observe atmospheric phenomena as Transient Luminous Events and in particular the ELVES, which take place when an electromagnetic wave generated by intra-cloud lightning interacts with the ionosphere, ionizing it and producing apparently superluminal expanding rings of several 100 km and lasting about 100 s. These highly energetic fast events have been observed to be produced in conjunction also with Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes and therefore a detailed study of their characteristics (speed, radius, energy ...) is of crucial importance for the understanding of these phenomena. In this paper we present the observational capabilities of ELVE detection by Mini-EUSO and specifically the reconstruction and study of ELVE characteristics

EUSO-SPB1 mission and science

The Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon 1 (EUSO-SPB1) was launched in 2017 April from Wanaka, New Zealand. The plan of this mission of opportunity on a NASA super pressure balloon test flight was to circle the southern hemisphere. The primary scientific goal was to make the first observations of ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray extensive air showers (EASs) by looking down on the atmosphere with an ultraviolet (UV) fluorescence telescope from suborbital altitude (33 km). After 12 days and 4 h aloft, the flight was terminated prematurely in the Pacific Ocean. Before the flight, the instrument was tested extensively in the West Desert of Utah, USA, with UV point sources and lasers. The test results indicated that the instrument had sensitivity to EASs of ⪆ 3 EeV. Simulations of the telescope system, telescope on time, and realized flight trajectory predicted an observation of about 1 event assuming clear sky conditions. The effects of high clouds were estimated to reduce this value by approximately a factor of 2. A manual search and a machine-learning-based search did not find any EAS signals in these data. Here we review the EUSO-SPB1 instrument and flight and the EAS search

Neutrino Target-of-Opportunity Observations with Space-based and Suborbital Optical Cherenkov Detectors

Cosmic-ray accelerators capable of reaching ultra-high energies are expected to also produce very-high energy neutrinos via hadronic interactions within the source or its surrounding environment. Many of the candidate astrophysical source classes are either transient in nature or exhibit flaring activity. Using the Earth as a neutrino converter, suborbital and space-based optical Cherenkov detectors, such as EUSO-SPB2 and POEMMA, will be able to detect upward-moving extensive air showers induced by decay tau-leptons generated from cosmic tau neutrinos with energies ∼10 PeV and above. Both EUSO-SPB2 and POEMMA will be able to quickly repoint, enabling rapid response to astrophysical transient events. we calculate the transient sensitivity and sky coverage for both EUSO-SPB2 and POEMMA, accounting for constraints imposed by the Sun and the Moon on the observation time. We also calculate both detectors\u27 neutrino horizons for a variety of modeled astrophysical neutrino fluences. We find that both EUSO-SPB2 and POEMMA will achieve transient sensitivities at the level of modeled neutrino fluences for nearby sources. We conclude with a discussion of the prospects of each mission detecting at least one transient event for various modeled astrophysical neutrino sources

Neutrino Target-of-Opportunity Observations with Space-based and Suborbital Optical Cherenkov Detectors

Cosmic-ray accelerators capable of reaching ultra-high energies are expected to also produce very-high energy neutrinos via hadronic interactions within the source or its surrounding environment. Many of the candidate astrophysical source classes are either transient in nature or exhibit flaring activity. Using the Earth as a neutrino converter, suborbital and space-based optical Cherenkov detectors, such as POEMMA and EUSO-SPB2, will be able to detect upward-moving extensive air showers induced by decaying tau-leptons generated from cosmic tau neutrinos with energies ∼10 PeV and above. Both EUSO-SPB2 and POEMMA will be able to quickly repoint, enabling rapid response to astrophysical transient events. We calculate the transient sensitivity and sky coverage for both EUSO-SPB2 and POEMMA, accounting for constraints imposed by the Sun and the Moon on the observation time. We also calculate both detectors\u27 neutrino horizons for a variety of modeled astrophysical neutrino fluences. We find that both EUSO-SPB2 and POEMMA will achieve transient sensitivities at the level of modeled neutrino fluences for nearby sources. We conclude with a discussion of the prospects of each mission detecting at least one transient event for various modeled astrophysical neutrino sources

Simulation studies for the Mini-EUSO detector

Mini-EUSO is a mission of the JEM-EUSO program flying onboard the International Space Station since August 2019. Since the first data acquisition in October 2019, more than 35 sessions have been performed for a total of 52 hours of observations. The detector has been observing Earth at night-time in the UV range and detected a wide variety of transient sources all of which have been modeled through Monte Carlo simulations. Mini-EUSO is also capable of detecting meteors and potentially space debris and we performed simulations for such events to estimate their impact on future missions for cosmic ray science from space. We show here examples of the simulation work done in this framework to analyze the Mini-EUSO data. The expected response of Mini-EUSO with respect to ultra high energy cosmic ray showers has been studied. The efficiency curve of Mini-EUSO as a function of primary energy has been estimated and the energy threshold for Cosmic Rays has been placed to be above 10$^{21}$ eV. We compared the morphology of several transient events detected during the mission with cosmic ray simulations and excluded that they can be due to cosmic ray showers. To validate the energy threshold of the detector, a system of ground based flashers is being used for end-to-end calibration purposes. We therefore implemented a parameterization of such flashers into the JEM-EUSO simulation framework and studied the response of the detector with respect to such sources

Estimation of the exposure of the TUS space-based cosmic ray observatory

The TUS observatory was the first orbital detector aimed at the detection of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). It was launched on April 28, 2016, from the Vostochny cosmodrome in Russia and operated until December 2017. It collected ∼80,000 events with a time resolution of 0.8~μs. A fundamental parameter to be determined for cosmic ray studies is the exposure of an experiment. This parameter is important to estimate the average expected event rate as a function of energy and to calculate the absolute flux in case of event detection. Here we present results of a study aimed to calculate the exposure that TUS accumulated during its mission. The role of clouds, detector dead time, artificial sources, storms, lightning discharges, airglow and moon phases is studied in detail. An exposure estimate with its geographical distribution is presented. We report on the applied technique and on the perspectives of this study in view of the future missions of the JEM-EUSO program

Measurement of UV light emission of the nighttime Earth by Mini-EUSO for space-based UHECR observations

The JEM-EUSO (Joint Experiment Missions for Extreme Universe Space Observatory) program aims at the realization of the ultra-high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) observation using wide field of view fluorescence detectors in orbit. Ultra-violet (UV) light emission from the atmosphere such as airglow and anthropogenic light on the Earth\u27s surface are the main background for the space-based UHECR observations. The Mini-EUSO mission has been operated on the International Space Station (ISS) since 2019 which is the first space-based experiment for the program. The Mini-EUSO instrument consists of a 25 cm refractive optics and the photo-detector module with the 2304-pixel array of the multi-anode photomultiplier tubes. On the nadir-looking window of the ISS, the instrument is capable of continuously monitoring a ~300 km x 300 km area. In the present work, we report the preliminary result of the measurement of the UV light in the nighttime Earth using the Mini-EUSO data downlinked to the ground. We mapped UV light distribution both locally and globally below the ISS obit. Simulations were also made to characterize the instrument response to diffuse background light. We discuss the impact of such light on space-based UHECR observations and the Mini-EUSO science objectives