Hydro-Ecology Toolkit – supporting sustainable abstraction

Given the potentially large financial investments required for projects to protect these valuable ecosystems and services, there is an urgent need for hydro-ecological models that quantify the links between water resource pressures and ecology, to make sure water companies are investing in the right places.

Working with the Environment Agency

Developing and applying hydro-ecological models requires specialist programming skills and can be a laborious and time-consuming process. To support hydro-ecological models for sustainable abstraction management, the Environment Agency commissioned APEM Group to design and develop a tool for assembling, processing and analysing open-source ecological monitoring and river flow datasets. The resulting product – the Hydro-Ecology Toolkit – speeds up and standardises the process of developing predictive hydro-ecological models, enabling water companies to better assess current and future environmental impacts and target investments.

About the Hydro-Ecology Toolkit

Applying the Hydro-Ecology Toolkit will help water companies, consultants and regulators to assess and predict the ecological impacts of current and future water abstraction and drought. In the short term, the software will be used by water companies for drought planning and supply maintenance. In the longer term, we see water companies using the Hydro-Ecology Toolkit to help build plans to protect freshwater and wetland habitats as part of their Water Resources Management Plans, Strategic Resource Options and AMP8 environmental investigation programmes. More generally, the Hydro-Ecology Toolkit will also be used to support sustainable reservoir management, assess the environmental effects of abstraction licence changes and evaluate the benefits of river restoration projects.

An overview of the tool

The Hydro-Ecology Toolkit was rolled out in March 2023 via a series of training workshops, attended by over 50 delegates. The workshop videos and training materials can be accessed here.

The Hydro-Ecology Toolkit is a library of open-source code that includes functions for:

• Downloading data from the National River Flow Archive, Hydrology Data Explorer, Ecology Data Explorer, and River Habitat Survey databases
• Calculating expected scores for macroinvertebrate indices using the River Invertebrate Classification Tool (RICT)
• Infilling missing flow data
• Characterising antecedent flow conditions
• Visualising ecology and flow data
• Joining hydrological and ecological data into a form suited to modelling
• Fitting and evaluating statistical hydro-ecological models

An innovation to benefit nature, the water industry, consultants, contractors and legislators

The Environment Agency’s National Framework for Water Resources (2020) challenges water companies to increase their environmental ambition and to take steps to proactively enhance the water environment. With tools developed by APEM Group, water companies can ensure that targeted investment delivers value for money for customers and tangible benefits for the environment.

The Hydro-Ecology Toolkit is publicly available to download from Github along with worked examples to guide users through the process of developing a hydro-ecological model from scratch.

The toolkit is one of many innovative tools and products developed by APEM Group. Read more about our technology innovations, or contact our hydro-ecology team about using the toolkit.