Ecological consequences of flow regulation by Run-of-River hydropower on salmonids
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Streams are dynamic, disturbance-driven ecosystems, where flow plays a dominant role structuring biological communities. Anthropogenic activities on streams change natural patterns of flow and disturbance, which in turn alters the conditions to which resident fishes are adapted, and their survival and fitness. Run-of-river (RoR) hydropower projects are an example of an anthropogenic activity that may alter stream ecosystems by temporarily diverting a proportion of stream flow to produce electricity. RoR hydropower projects have increased considerably in number and importance in the last three decades in both British Columbia and worldwide. Although there is a perception that RoR hydropower has minimal effects on stream ecosystems due to the small physical footprint of projects, we know surprisingly little about the impacts of RoR hydropower on fish populations. In this thesis, I use a combination of published research, empirical data, and models to evaluate a range of hypotheses regarding how RoR hydropower may affect fish populations, concentrating on salmonid species whose freshwater habitats often overlap with RoR projects. In Chapter 2, I synthesize the impact pathways by which RoR hydropower may influence salmonid populations, inferred from studies of reservoir-storage hydropower and salmonid ecology. In Chapter 3, I use empirical data to quantify increases in water temperature due to RoR flow diversion and explore the possible consequences for resident fish growth with bioenergetics models. In Chapter 4, I evaluate how stranding from anthropogenic flow fluctuations affects the long-term population dynamics of coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) in RoR-regulated rivers using a matrix model integrating both the strength and timing of freshwater density dependence. Finally, in Chapter 5, I quantify the high level of uncertainty in how much compensation habitat is required to offset chronic mortality incurred by multiple life-stages of coho salmon. The global emergence of RoR hydropower projects emphasizes the importance of understanding their effects on aquatic ecosystems. Overall, our capacity to protect and restore threatened salmonid populations rests upon our ability to not only better understand the pathways of impacts, but also the effectiveness of both natural (density dependence) and human (habitat compensation) interventions that can be used to offset anthropogenic mortality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".