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**Policy & Planning
**Science & Statistics

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Central to the environmental flows concept is managing water to provide for people while maintaining river integrity. River or stream integrity depends greatly on the dynamic pattern of water flows, the natural flow regime. This course will explain foundational concepts and teach participants how to characterize the flow regime needed to maintain the integrity of rivers and use stakeholder processes to inform the process and create lasting solutions. It will also reveal key methods and tools as well as explain how to select the best option for each project. Participants will have the opportunity to learn through lectures, small group exercises, software tutorials, group projects, and discussions.

College Credit:  2 semester hours

Who Should Attend: Biologists and others that assess environmental flow needs and participate in determining flow allocations with stakeholders.

Length: 5 days /36 hours

Objectives: 

• Explain essential elements of the environmental flows concept and process;
• Perform situation analysis (account for the legal and cultural setting affecting a particular project);
• Integrate geomorphic dynamics and water quality, ecological connections and life cycles, human dependencies, and their variation into the environmental flow process;
• Identify key aspects of the hydrologic regime necessary to support individual aspects of an ecosystem;
• Derive flow recommendations for various components of a river ecosystem;
• Explain a four-level assessment approach for determining which set of tools and methods (SWAT, FIESTA, WEAP, IHA, “Savannah Process”, ELOHA) is of greatest usefulness to a particular project considering the amount of information on hydrology and ecology, flow data, and the degree of certainty required;
• Use stakeholder processes in the development of flow recommendations;
• Use Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration software to assess changes in river hydrologic regimes;
• Develop a process for deriving an environmental flow recommendation given a particular setting (over-allocated, high conservation value, data poor, and large rivers); and
• Describe ELOHA (Ecological Limits of Hydrologic Alteration), a new framework for determining environmental flow needs for many rivers simultaneously.