At a time in which humans have significantly affected the natural environment and yet society increasingly values the many services of natural ecosystems, accounting for ecological processes in engineering design is a major contemporary challenge for environmental and civil engineers.
Learning objective
This is the fundamental topic in ecohydraulics, the discipline that focuses on the consequences of fluid flow and related physical processes on the organisms that inhabit aquatic environments. While still a young science, ecohydraulics already endows the engineer with an overall understanding and quantitative tools to predict how physical processes shape habitat quality and quantity, enabling the analysis of different management options for natural and man-made water bodies in terms of their ecosystem consequences.
Content
This class will take a broad view of ecohydraulics and introduce students to key concepts in aquatic habitat modeling. Recognizing that an ecosystem is composed of diverse organisms with different seasonal habitat requirements across a range of scales, the class will focus on multiple representative groups of organisms, including fish, macroinvertebrates, plankton, and vegetation. The lectures will build on the students' knowledge of hydraulics, to give them both an appreciation for the dependence of organisms on their physical environment and a set of quantitative modeling approaches that they can take with them into engineering practice, in fields ranging from hydropower development and upgrade, to reservoir operation, river restoration, flood protection, water management and beyond. At the broadest scale, this class will contribute to the students' appreciation of the tight link between the natural and the built or impacted environment, and of the imperatives of considering both in the design process.
