TITLE:
Ecohydrologically Driven Catchment Evaluation and Prioritization
AUTHORS:
Sivarajah Mylevaganam, Raghavan Srinivasan, Vijay P. Singh
KEYWORDS:
Entropy, Principle of Maximum Entropy, Riverine Ecosystem, Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration, Maximum Entropy Ordered Weighted Averaging, Soil and Water Assessment Tool
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Applied Sciences,
Vol.5 No.7,
July
15,
2015
ABSTRACT: This study develops information based on index, and termed hydro-ecological-index, to represent the need of a riverine ecosystem characterized through a biologically relevant flow regime. The flow regime is defined by a set of parameters, called Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration. These parameters are predicted at the catchment scale by a hydrologic model, called Soil and Water Assessment Tool. Then the Maximum Entropy Ordered Weighted Averaging method is employed to aggregate non-commensurable biologically relevant flow regimes to develop hydro-ecological- index at the catchment scale. The resulting index reflects the variability of the need of the riverine ecosystem at catchment scale and thus different catchments can be evaluated and compared.