Future river health assuming climate change

Macroinvertebrate diversity in rivers is used as one of the indicators of fluvial ecological health. Extreme flows, both flood and drought, are known to influence the response of these communities in rivers. Climate change is predicted to exacerbate the frequency and severity of such extreme fluvial events, hence the ecological health of Scottish rivers may be impacted. This may be either directly by changes to flow regime and instability in the benthic/riparian sediments or indirectly by subsequent changes in the turbidity and water temperature.

This work would look to characterise the response of macroinvertebrate communities in selected Scottish rivers to extreme flows under existing conditions, and link flow and morphological considerations to ecological health. This work would build on work which utilises a mixture of statistical and numerical modelling (fluvial and habitat) to link flow to benthic habitat response. Alongside statistical models developed to link climate change projections (e.g. UKCP09) to flow responses (e.g. using Hidden Markov techniques). The PhD would seek to develop these ideas, investigate methods to preserve seasonality in the statistical models and consider how flow sequences/flood clusters may be incorporated into habitat models that couple hydraulic and morphological components; in order to understand the subsequent impact to future ecological health.