Environmental hedging: A theory and method for reconciling reservoir operations for downstream ecology and water supply

摘要: Building reservoir release schedules to manage engineered river systems can involve costly trade-offs between storing and releasing water. As a result, the design of requires metrics that quantify benefit damages created by releases downstream ecosystem. Such should support making operational decisions under uncertain hydrologic conditions, including drought flood seasons. This study addresses this need develops operation rule structure method maximize environmental while meeting human water demands. The result is general approach for hedging objectives. A multistage stochastic mixed-integer nonlinear program with Markov Chains, identifies optimal “environmental hedging,” benefits subject probabilistic seasonal current, past, future demand, supply needs, infrastructure limitations, population dynamics, storage protection, river's carrying capacity. Environmental “hedges bets” reducing fish, sometimes intentionally killing some fish early reduce likelihood large kills crises later. applied Folsom in California survival fall-run Chinook salmon lower American River range carryover initial cases. Benefit measured terms survival; maintaining self-sustaining native populations significant indicator ecosystem function. meets demand outperforms other operating rules, current strategy, based on extirpation reliability.