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A Landscape‐Based Regionalization of Natural Flow Regimes in the Ebro River Basin and Its Biological Validation
Author(s) -
Solans M. A.,
MelladoDíaz A.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
river research and applications
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.679
H-Index - 94
eISSN - 1535-1467
pISSN - 1535-1459
DOI - 10.1002/rra.2860
Subject(s) - streamflow , drainage basin , environmental science , evapotranspiration , hydrology (agriculture) , linear discriminant analysis , structural basin , ordination , streams , precipitation , water resources , geography , ecology , geology , cartography , statistics , mathematics , computer science , biology , paleontology , computer network , geotechnical engineering , meteorology
Flow prediction in ungauged basins is an important task for water resources planning and management, and remains a fundamental challenge for hydroecological research. Based on a previous classification of streams and rivers in the Ebro River basin (Spain), where six natural flow‐regime types were identified, we apply a new predictive approach of the flow regime type based on climatic and physiographic descriptors. We used a set of easily available environmental variables as discriminant parameters: annual precipitation, annual evapotranspiration, annual air temperature, elevation, catchment area, drainage density and geology. A stepwise landscape‐based classification procedure consisting of several stepwise discriminant analyses and canonical discriminant analyses allocated a set of sites with poor or no natural flow data into the flow types defined. Misclassification rates obtained by cross‐validation ranged between 1.12% and 11.9%. Additionally, the ecological soundness of the proposed regionalization was tested by the concordance between macroinvertebrate communities and the proposed classification using NMDS and ANOSIM. NMDS resulted in a clear separation of sites into five NFR classes with available macroinvertebrate data, and ANOSIM found significant differences in macroinvertebrate communities among classes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.