Completed doctoral thesis: Development and Application of a New Automatic Mesohabitat Approach
By changing a river for flood protection, hydropower production or navigation the biota in the river is affected by a change of their habitat. Methods to predict these habitat changes are needed for river management.
As part of the inter- and transdisciplinary research project “Hydraulic Engineering and Ecology“ (https://www.rivermanagement.ch/en/), this PhD research focused on the development and testing of a new method for predicting habitat changes on the mesoscale, which is the spatial scale of most interest in river management.
The newly developed method uses the output of numerical hydrodynamic models. By using a novel clustering algorithm with a spatial contiguity constraint it identifies spatially contiguous mesohabitat patches. Applying the new methodology together with conventional mesohabitat approaches can improve this methodology as well as the conventional approaches even further. Finally, the new methodology has been applied to identify the natural habitat variability within a river stretch due to flood-induced changes.