Natural streamflow and IHAs. Celone River case study

Title
Natural streamflow and IHA for setting an environmental flow. The Celone River case study

Description
Data reported in the present file refer to the Celone River (Apulia Region, Italy) at the river section downstream of the Capaccio Reservoir (41°26’06’’ N;15°25’51’’ E). Data include the natural streamflow at daily time scale and the Indicators of hydrological alterations (IHAs) computed from 1990 to 2009 by using the IHA software (The Nature Conservancy, 2009. Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration Version 7.1 User's Manual). Non-Parametric analysis was developed. Statistical analysis and flow duration curves are also provided in the file.
The present dataset is useful to set an environmental flow by using hydrological methods and is propaedeutic for hydraulic methods.
Daily streamflow data in natural conditions were obtained by using the SWAT model (De Girolamo et al., 2017). All the hydrological pressures such as point source discharge, water abstractions, and the reservoir were not included in the SWAT simulation (De Girolamo et al., 2017).
The twenty years of daily streamflow data stored in the file were used to calculate the IHAs. As described by Richter et al. (1996), the IHAs are able to describe the hydrological regime of a river and are strictly related to the river ecology. Based on the assumption that the full range of variability of streamflow regime is needed to preserve the river ecosystem (Arthington, 2012; Poff et al., 1997), the environmental flow was designed for the Celone River by Acuña et al., 2020.
References
Acuña V., Jorda-Capdevila D., Vezza P., De Girolamo A.M., McClain M.E., Stubbington R., Pastor A.V., Lamouroux N., von Schiller D., Munné A., Datry T. 2020. Accounting for flow intermittency in environmental flows design. Journal of Applied Ecology, doi: 10.1111/1365-2664.13590
De Girolamo, A.M., Barca, E., Pappagallo, G. & Lo Porto, A. 2017. Simulating ecologically relevant hydrological indicators in a temporary river system. Agricultural Water Management, 180, 194–204.
Arthington, A. (2012) Environmental Flows. Saving Rivers in the Third Millenium. University of California Press, Berkeley, California.
Poff, N.L., Allan, J.D., Bain, M.B., Karr, J.R., Prestegaard, K.L., Richter, B.D., … Stromberg, J.C. (1997) The Natural Flow Regime. BioScience, 47, 769–784.