Restoring the perennial Great Ruaha River using ecohydrology, engineering and governance methods in Tanzania

Kihwele, Emilian; Muse, Epaphras A.; Magomba, Evance; Mnaya, Bakari; Nassoro, Ahamed; Banga, Paul; Murashani, Edimund; Irmamasita, Daniel; Kiwango, Halima; Birkett, C. M.; Wolanski, Eric

doi:10.1016/j.ecohyd.2017.10.008

Cited by 17 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…, Smit , Owen‐Smith , Kihwele et al. ). However, herbivore distributions are confounded by other factors such as predation risk and food availability, so that distance to water is not a reliable indicator of water dependency.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying water requirements of African ungulates through a combination of functional traits

Kihwele

Mchomvu

Owen‐Smith

et al. 2020

Ecological Monographs

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Citation: Kihwele, E. S., V. Mchomvu, N. Owen-Smith, R. S. Hetem, M. C. Hutchinson, A. B. Potter, H. Olff, and M. P. Veldhuis. 2020. Quantifying water requirements of African ungulates through a combination of functional traits. Ecological Monographs 90(2):Abstract. Climate and land use change modify surface water availability in African savannas. Surface water is a key resource for both wildlife and livestock and its spatial and temporal distribution is important for understanding the composition of large herbivore assemblages in savannas. Yet, the extent to which ungulate species differ in their water requirements remains poorly quantified. Here, we infer the water requirements of 48 African ungulates by combining six different functional traits related to physiological adaptations to reduce water loss, namely minimum dung moisture, relative dung pellet size, relative surface area of the distal colon, urine osmolality, relative medullary thickness, and evaporation rate. In addition, we investigated how these differences in water requirements relate to differences in dietary water intake. We observed strong correlations between traits related to water loss through dung, urine and evaporation, suggesting that ungulates minimize water loss through multiple pathways simultaneously, which suggests that each trait can thus be used independently to predict water requirements. Furthermore, we found that browsers and grazers had similar water requirements, but browsers are expected to be less dependent on surface water because they acquire more water through their diet. We conclude that these key functional traits are a useful way to determine differences in water requirements and an important tool for predicting changes in herbivore community assembly resulting from changes in surface water availability.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying water requirements of African ungulates through a combination of functional traits

Kihwele

Mchomvu

Owen‐Smith

et al. 2020

Ecological Monographs

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“…As Tanzania endeavours to navigate trade‐offs between meeting societal water needs and supporting functioning ecosystems, there is heightened attention on ongoing water sector reform. National guidance on the procedures for assessing the environmental flow needs of rivers, lakes, and other wetlands exists (URT, 2018), and continues to evolve as the different instruments designed to determine and allocate the reserve are applied in different parts of the country (Kihwele et al, 2018; O'Keeffe et al, 2019). One of the first steps in this process is to classify the water bodies and determine their hydrological status (URT, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, we performed an inductive classification of the rivers of the Rufiji River Basin according to ecologically relevant hydrologic metrics estimated from long‐term discharge records from river gauging stations. The Rufiji River Basin is Tanzania's largest river basin and is considered a model basin for the application of a range of water resource management tools due to past and projected future socioecological development and climate change (e.g., Chilagane et al, 2020; England, 2019; Kihwele et al, 2018; Näschen et al, 2019). The resulting hydrologic classes were mapped and characterized according to their defining hydrologic conditions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hydrologic classification of Tanzanian rivers to support national water resource policy

et al. 2021

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Classifying rivers into homogeneous categories based on hydrological and/or environmental attributes supports the implementation of environmental flows to sustain aquatic ecosystems and support the resource needs of society. Hydrological classifications provide decision‐makers with a pragmatic number of water management units by grouping individual rivers or river segments expected to exhibit similar biophysical responses to flow alteration. Such classifications are particularly useful across broad geographies and in data‐limited contexts, such as in Tanzania, where the legal requirement to implement environmental flows for all major waterbodies remains constrained by scant data. We present a two‐level hydrological classification of all Tanzanian basins and the Rufiji River Basin. For the Rufiji River Basin, the largest river basin in the country, we performed an inductive classification based on the availability of long‐term time series of daily average discharge. We clustered 28 gauging stations into seven classes according to ecologically relevant hydrological metrics and used boosted classification trees to predict the hydrological class of all 95,909 river segments in the basin based on environmental attributes that influence flow regimes. In the absence of consistent, readily‐available gauged flow data, we conducted a deductive classification of all Tanzanian rivers whereby segments were directly grouped by multivariate similarity using the same environmental attributes. This analysis revealed 10 river classes reflecting the diversity of ecohydrological conditions characterizing the 486,681 river segments draining in and out of Tanzania. The new hydrological classifications presented here provide the foundation to guide implementation of management practices within the water policy framework of Tanzania.

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“…The governance based on institutional principle is also important for decision making in which the distribution is usually made equally for both society and nature (Kattel 2019). The decision of water distribution based on eco-hydrological modeling and supported by engineering solution of irrigation and cropping pattern in the watershed would usually meet the hydrological needs of the local water users throughout the year (Kihwele et al 2018).…”

Section: Improving Water Governance For Resilient Aquatic Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing Ecological and Hydrological Conditions in the Himalayan Mountains and Measures of Future Adaptation

Kattel

2021

Jalawaayu

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The Himalayan mountains are one of the important geographical settings of the planet Earth for the source of global freshwaters. The freshwaters from the Himalayas are life supporting systems of the millions of people residing in downstream Asia. However, the high-altitude mountains of the Himalayas have gone through considerable transformations in hydrology and ecology over the recent past. In the 21st century, the hydrological flow regimes of glacial-fed rivers are threatened by both climate change and human disturbances. Rapidly changing temperature and the frequency, duration and timing of monsoonal precipitation have altered glacier melt, river flow, flood, and downstream volume of water. As a result, the ecosystems and biodiversity as well as irrigation-dependent agriculture in the region is profoundly impacted. The fundamental challenge today is therefore to address the issue of water resources through understanding of hydrological and ecological changes of lake and river systems in the region. Ecohydrology is a sustainability concept, which addresses water resource management through understanding of water cycle, including hydrological processes of rivers and lakes and the structure, and function of ecosystems. Putting ecohydrology at the center of the water resource management program, this mini review discusses rapid ecological and hydrological changes of freshwater systems in the Himalayan mountains and suggested some of the key future adaptation strategies of water resources to rapidly changing regional environment.

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Restoring the perennial Great Ruaha River using ecohydrology, engineering and governance methods in Tanzania

Cited by 17 publications

References 20 publications

Quantifying water requirements of African ungulates through a combination of functional traits

Quantifying water requirements of African ungulates through a combination of functional traits

Hydrologic classification of Tanzanian rivers to support national water resource policy

Changing Ecological and Hydrological Conditions in the Himalayan Mountains and Measures of Future Adaptation

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