Interdisciplinary Reservoir Management—A Tool for Sustainable Water Resources Management

Abstract

Reservoirs are a common way to store and retain water serving for a multitude of purposes like storage of drinking and irrigation water, recreation, flood protection, navigation, and hydropower production, and have been built since centuries. Today, few reservoirs serve only one purpose, which requires management of present demands and interests. Since each reservoir project will cause negative impacts alongside desired advantages both on a local, regional and global scale, it is even more urgent to develop a common management framework in an attempt to mitigate negative impacts, incorporate different demands and make them visible within the discourse in order to avoid conflicts from early on. The scientific publications on reservoirs are manifold, yet a comprehensive and integrative holistic tool about management of this infrastructure is not available. Therefore, a comprehensive and integrated conceptual tool was developed and proposed by the authors of this paper that can contribute to the sustainable management of existing reservoirs. The tool presented herein is based on the results from the interdisciplinary CHARM (CHAllenges of Reservoir Management) project as well as the condensed outcome of relevant literature to aid and enhance knowledge of reservoir management. The incorporated results are based on field, laboratory and empirical social research. The project CHARM focused on five different aspects related to existing reservoirs in southern Germany (Schwarzenbachtalsperre, Franconian Lake District), namely: sedimentation of reservoirs, biostabilisation of fine sediments, toxic cyanobacteria(l) (blooms), greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs and social contestation, respectively consent. These five research foci contributed to the topics and setup of a conceptual tool, put together by the research consortium via delphi questioning, which can be found alongside this publication to provide insights for experts and laymen. Conceptualising and analysing the management in combination with quantitative and qualitative data in one descriptive tool presents a novelty for the case studies and area of research. The distribution within the scientific community and interested public will possibly make a positive contribution to the goal of sustainable water resources management in the future.

Application of Harris Hawks Optimization with Reservoir Simulation Model Considering Hedging Rule for Network Reservoir System

“…They are commonly used as standard operating guidelines for water discharges. This is the criterion that allows for the release of as much water as the downstream water demand [17,18]. On the other hand, it may not be appropriate for the reservoir in times of severe water scarcity, that is, when a reservoir has only a small amount of water flowing into it, but there is high downstream water demand.…”

Applying of Marine Predators Algorithm Linked with Reservoir Simulation Model considering Sedimentation for Reservoir Operation

“…e reservoir is responsible for storing, allocating, and mitigating oods and drought, which are managed under the reservoir operation process. e mission of reservoir operation is to decide how to store and deliver water for various purposes, planning how much water should be collected and delivered from the reservoir at di erent intervals through an essential and fundamental tool called reservoir rule curves [4][5][6].…”

The Physicochemical Properties of Deposited Sediments at the Maruba Dam Reservoir Inlet, Machakos County, Kenya

“…e available freshwater resources in developing countries are unable to meet the huge demand for water in domestic, agricultural, and industrial operations [4]. As a consequence, retention of river/stream runo s in reservoirs has been identi ed as a feasible option for ghting global water challenges [5][6][7]. Reservoirs, therefore, play an important economic role, which sorely depends on the water storage capacity [8][9][10].…”