New Methods for the Assessment of Flow Regime Alteration under Climate Change and Human Disturbance

Climate change and anthropogenic activities do collectively lead to an alteration of the flow regime, posing a great influence upon the structure and persistence of native biotic communities within river ecosystems. The range of variability approach (RVA) method is commonly used to evaluate the flow regime alteration. However, it was reported to underestimate the degree of flow regime potentially. In this study, two new assessment methods/metrics for evaluating the process behaviors of the flow regime are developed based on Euclidean distance and dynamic time warping (DTW) distance. They are then integrated with the metric of RVA, generating two composite metrics that represent both frequency and process changes of the flow regime. The new methods/metrics were applied to identify the flow regime alteration in a typical basin in the middle reaches of the Yellow River, China. The results show that the composite metrics consistently reveal a high alteration degree of flow regime in the basin. The decreased biological integrity of fish demonstrates the reasonability of the high-level overall alteration to some degree. The updated methods enable more scientific evaluation for the complex hydrologic alteration under a changing environment.