Notice
Adapting social-cultural-environmental flows for cold regions.
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Descriptif
In northern regions, many rivers remain ice-covered for a period of three to six months and have two distinct low flow periods: mid-winter and mid to late summer. Societal water demands are highly seasonal, for example with peaks in demand being associated with summer agricultural activities in many regions, and access and navigation of systems with complex seasonal wetting/drying of deltaic environments. We have divided our talk into two parts to explore environmental flows in cold regions; the first half explores applications in eastern Canada where most jurisdictions are still using prescriptions of minimum discharge as environmental flows. We compared the most commonly used metrics on over fifty rivers in the southern part of the province of Québec and showed that a “one size fits all” approach is not optimal for this region. In order to provide insight to a broader community of stakeholders and include indirect information on fish habitat and the ecological health of the river, two additional variables are being considered: the wetted perimeter and river temperature. The second half presents components from two holistic application case studies from Canada: the Wolastoq (St. John River, New Brunswick) and the Peace-Athabasca Delta (Alberta) with a focus on the key social and cultural components of these cold region environmental flows frameworks.
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