Environmental Hydraulics in the New Millennium: Historical Evolution and Recent Research Trends

Abstract

Environmental Hydraulics (EH) is the scientific study of environmental water flows and their related transport and transformation processes in natural water systems. This review provides some remarks about the historical development of EH throughout three different paradigms or ages, namely, the Public Health Age, the Water Quality Age, and finally the Integrated Environmental Hydraulics Age. We further evaluate how EH research has changed in the last 20 years through a bibliometric analysis of the proceedings of the International Symposium on Environmental Hydraulics (ISEH) and Environmental Fluid Mechanics (EFMC) journal articles conducted using Citespace and Leximancer. Authors and affiliations are analyzed to identify patterns of collaboration, followed by an analysis of the temporal evolution of the EFMC impact index as well as its highly-cited articles. Finally, the major EH topics are identified with a comparison between the topics extracted from the two different sources. As the EH field is becoming rapidly global, some topics were confirmed to have attracted more interest in EH such as Flow Condition, Numerical Modelling, Experimental Measurements. It is hoped that our findings could provide a reference for students, academics, and policy-makers related to EH.

Advances in Environmental Hydraulics

“…This Special Issue collected two review articles and 10 original research articles with a broad range of scientific problems, physical processes, and natural water systems. One review paper [10] features the historical evolution of EH and the observed shift in its research trends through the bibliometric analysis of the latest EH literature. The second review paper [11] deals with the environmental impacts associated with the rapidly growing mariculture industry, while one research paper [12] investigated the flow and concentration patterns downstream an aquaculture cage net panel in parametric flume experiments.…”

“…Zeng et al [10] reviewed how EH, as a subdiscipline, has evolved from its origin and traced the shift of its latest research trends in the last 20 years. The authors first provided an overview of the historical evolution of EH describing in detail the earlier mentioned ages, namely the Public Health Age, the Water Quality Age and the Integrated Environmental Hydraulics Age.…”