Research on the improvement of wetted perimeter method and application in seasonal rivers-a case study of Fenhe River, China

Environmental flow is vital for maintaining river ecosystem health and ensuring the normal growth of aquatic organisms. The wetted perimeter method is indeed very useful in the assessment of environmental flow due to consideration of stream forms and minimum flow for aquatic life habitat. In this study, a river with obvious seasonality and external water diversion was selected as the typical research object; taking Jingle, Lancun, Fenhe Reservoir, and Yitang hydrological sections as control sections, we improved the existing wetted perimeter method in three aspects: (1) We improved the selection of hydrological data series. The selected hydrological data series should be of a certain length and can well reflect the hydrological changes of wet, normal, and dry years. (2) Different from the traditional wetted perimeter method, which only gives one environmental flow value, the improved method calculates the environmental flow month by month. (3) The improved wetted perimeter method establishes the relationship between native fish survival and environmental flow. Results indicated that the improved wetted perimeter took the survival of the main fishes into consideration, the ratio of the calculated results by the slope method to the multi year average flow was greater than 10%, which can ensure the fishes' habitat is not being destroyed, and the results are more reasonable. Furthermore, the monthly environmental flow processes obtained were better than the annual unified environmental flow value determined by the existing method and are consistent with the natural hydrological situation and water diversion situation of the river. This study shows that the improved wetted perimeter method is feasible for research of river environmental flow with strong seasonal and large variation of annual flow.