California Altered Streamflow Classification

In California, riverine ecosystems adapt to a Mediterranean climate: floods in wet winters, snowmelt flows in spring and low flows in summer. Humans have modified the natural river flow patterns in California by storing water during winter and releasing during summer and diverting water from streams. Resulting alterations to the natural flow regimes have degraded riverine ecosystems. Both intense climatic variability and profoundly altered rivers increase the importance of understanding the diversity of streamflow patterns. The present electronic resources quantifies the human alteration on flow regimes in California by categorizing impaired flow regime classes from human alteration. This study is based on the hydrologic classification of altered rivers in California developed by Guitron (2020). This resources share the predicted hydrologic class for impaired flows in California.