Davide Vanzo

• PhD
• Researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

The operational practice of "hydropeaking" allows hydropower plants to cover peaks and deficits in energy demand, but it also impacts river ecosystems. The assessment of hydropeaking impacts plays an important role in safeguarding ecosystem services, but is challenging due to the relative importance of impacts at different sites. To compare impacts...

The operational practice of “hydropeaking” allows hydropower plants to cover peaks and deficits in energy demand, but it also impacts river ecosystems. The assessment of hydropeaking impacts plays an important role in safeguarding ecosystem services, but is challenging due to the relative importance of impacts at different sites. To compare impacts...

Human activities significantly alter natural river flows, impacting ecosystem functioning and biodiversity worldwide. Hydropeaking, resulting from intermittent on-demand hydropower generation, introduces sub-daily flow fluctuations exceeding natural variability. While the effects of single hydropeaking events are well-studied, the cumulative impact...

Natural accumulations of wood, as well as engineered logjams, are relevant for river ecosystems. These structures, by interacting with the flow, can lead to significant backwater effects and morphological changes. Research on engineered logjams has so far mainly relied on physical modeling, which may impede the study of different flow conditions or...

As the share of renewable energy grows worldwide, flexible energy production from peak-operating hydropower and the phenomenon of hydropeaking have received increasing attention. In this study, we collected open research questions from 220 experts in river science, practice, and policy across the globe using an online survey available in six langua...

River morphology is closely linked with riparian vegetation dynamics, because of the interwoven interactions between plants, flow, and sediment transport. However, open-source tools that model such interactions are currently missing. Here we present BASEveg, a python package to simulate riparian vegetation dynamics coupled with BASEMENT, a river hy...

As the share of renewable energy grows worldwide, flexible energy production from peak-operating hydropower and the phenomenon of hydropeaking have received increasing attention. In this study, we collected open research questions from 220 experts in river science, practice, and policy across the globe using an online survey available in six langua...

Numerical hydrodynamic models enable the simulation of hydraulic conditions under various scenarios and are thus suitable tools for hydropeaking related assessments. However, the choice of the necessary model complexity and the consequences of modelling choices are not trivial and only few guidelines exist. In this study, we systematically evaluate...

Storage hydropower plants, which are an important component of energy production in Switzerland, can lead to hydro‐ and thermopeaking, affecting river habitats and organisms. In this study, we developed an approach for integrating water temperature simulations into a habitat model to assess the impact of both hydro‐ and thermopeaking on the availab...

During flood events, river topography and fluvial habitats can change drastically, potentially affecting the ecological status. In case of multiple floods, whether each single event modifies the habitat characteristics in the same direction or not, is still an open question. We gathered high quality topographical data of one braided Alpine reach be...

We present a flux vector splitting method for the one and two‐dimensional shallow water equations following the approach first proposed by Toro and Vázquez1 for the compressible Euler equations. The resulting first‐order schemes turn out to be exceedingly simple, with accuracy and robustness comparable to that of the sophisticated Godunov upwind me...

An increase in the demand for renewable energy is driving hydropower development and its integration with variable renewable energy sources. When hydropower is produced flexibly from hydropower plants, it causes rapid and frequent artificial flow fluctuations in rivers, a phenomenon known as hydropeaking. Hydropeaking and associated hydrological al...

Numerical hydrodynamic models enable the simulation of hydraulic conditions under various scenarios and are thus suitable tools for hydropeaking related assessments. However, the choice of the necessary model complexity and the consequences of modelling choices are not trivial and only few guidelines exist. In this study we systematically evaluate...

We present an advection-pressure flux-vector splitting method for the one and two- dimensional shallow water equations following the approach first proposed by Toro and V\'azquez for the compressible Euler equations. The resulting first-order schemes turn out to be exceedingly simple, with accuracy and robustness comparable to that of the sophistic...

Description of a new freeware model that allows computing river hydromorphodynamics and vegetation dynamics.

We present a splitting method for the one-dimensional Saint-Venant-Exner equations used for describing the bed evolution in shallow water systems. We adapt the flux vector splitting approach of Toro and Vázquez-Cendón (2012) and identify one subsystem of conservative equations (advection system) and one of non-conservative equations (pressure syste...

Modelling river physical processes is of critical importance for flood protection, river management and restoration of riverine environments. Developments in algorithms and computational power have led to a wider spread of river simulation tools. However, the use of two-dimensional models can still be hindered by complexity in the setup and the hig...

Water quality in tropical rivers is changing rapidly. The ongoing boom of dam construction for hydropower is one of the drivers for this change. In particular, the stratification in tropical reservoirs induces oxygen deficits in their deep waters and warmer surface water temperatures, which often translate into altered thermal and oxygen regimes of...

Hydropeaking research has generated unprecedented scientific discussion in the last twenty years and improved our understanding of the processes resulting from hydropeaking by strengthening the links between basic knowledge and practical applications. Given the reportedly increase in hydropeaking operations and applications in recent years, this Sp...

Modelling river physical processes is of critical importance for flood protection, river management and restoration of riverine environments. Developments in algorithms and computational power have led to a wider spread of river simulation tools. However, the use of two-dimensional models can still be hindered by complexity in the setup and the hig...

Study region The new formulation was applied in a complex tropical river system of Luanginga sub-basin, western Zambia. Study focus We propose a novel pseudo-reservoir concept (hereinafter PSRC) in the framework of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), to mimick and model the behavior of an alluvial floodplain. Outflows from PSRC are predicat...

We present a splitting method for the one-dimensional Saint-Venant-Exner equations used for describing the bed evolution in shallow water systems. We adapt the flux vector splitting approach of Toro and Vazquez-Cend\`on and identify one subsystem of conservative equations (advection system) and one of non-conservative equations (pressure system), b...

The spread of two‐dimensional numerical hydrodynamic tools for ecohydraulic applications allowed for the development of automatic habitat detection methods, adopted as predicting tools for river habitat analysis. These automatic approaches differ for the employed identification rules, such as preference curves, fuzzy rules and clustering methods. P...

As the demand for hydroelectricity progresses worldwide, small hydropower operators are increasingly examining the feasibility of using existing infrastructure (e.g., settling basins) in run-of-the-river schemes for intermittent power production. Such flexible production causes short-term discharge fluctuations (hydropeaking) in downstream reaches...

Donwload one of the 50 free eprints here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/C4B3NQVBGVH7HSGSRXTP/full?target=10.1080/24705357.2020.1813057 Interdisciplinary approaches are required to tackle complex environmental issues as freshwater ecosystems face unprecedented pressures globally. The emerging Ecohydraulics field of research should, therefore,...

The numerical modelling of hydro- and morphodynamics in watercourses is of great importance for both the scientific understanding of processes and for design in engineering practice. For this purpose, and especially adapted to alpine and subalpine conditions, the modelling software BASEMENT has been developed and integrated into a simulation enviro...

Morphological accelerators, such as the MORFAC (MORphological acceleration FACtor) approach, are widely adopted techniques for the acceleration of the bed evolution, which reduces the computational cost of morphodynamic numerical simulations. In this work we apply a non-uniform acceleration to the one-dimensional morphodynamic problem described by...

Excess fine sediment, comprising particles <2 mm in diameter, is a major cause of ecological degradation in rivers. The erosion of fine sediment from terrestrial or aquatic sources, its delivery to the river, and its storage and transport in the fluvial environment are controlled by a complex interplay of physical, biological, and anthropogenic fac...

Morphological accelerators, such as the MORFAC (MORphological acceleration FACtor) approach, are widely adopted techniques for the acceleration of the bed evolution, which reduce the computational cost of morphodynamic numerical simulations. In this work we apply an acceleration to the one-dimensional morphodynamic problem described by the de Saint...

Early career researchers (ECRs) play a critical role in our increasingly knowledge-based society, yet they are the most vulnerable group in the scientific community. As a relatively young, interdisciplinary science, ecohydraulics is particularly reliant on ECRs for future progress. In 2014, the Early Careers on Ecohydraulics Network (ECoENet) was c...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, using the Cattaneo's relaxation approach, we reformulate the system of governing equations for the pollutant transport by shallow water flows over non-flat topography and anisotropic diffusion as hyperbolic balance laws with stiff source terms. The proposed relaxation system circumvents the infinite wave...

Lundesokna River (Norway) regularly experiences severe discharge fluctuations due to upstream hydropower plant releases, which significantly increase the potential fish stranding areas (Casas-Mulet et al. 2014) . Several hydro-morphological features are recognized to determine the fish stranding (e.g. Young et al. 2011) ; among the others, we selec...

River reaches downstream hydropower plants regularly experience severe discharge reductions due to production shutdowns. Such rapid dewatering processes result in harmful, even lethal conditions for some biological species. Focusing on fish community, several eco-hydraulic features, e.g. wetted area variation, dewatering rate, grain size heterogene...

The thermal regime of rivers is threatened by anthropogenic stresses at a large variety of time scales. We focus on sub-daily thermal alterations induced by the release of hypolimnetic water for hydropower production (thermopeaking). We analyse the thermal signal focusing on the following characteristics that are potentially affected by hypolimneti...

Release of water from storage hydropower plants generates rapid flow and stage fluctuations (hydropeaking) in the receiving water bodies at a variety of sub-daily time-scales. In this paper we present an approach to quantify such variations, which is easy to apply, requires stream flow data at a readily available resolution, and allows for the comp...

Hydropeaking related to hydropower operations produces adverse ecological effects that depend on its interaction with the channel morphology. A first quantitative attempt is proposed to investigate the eco-hydraulic response of different river morphologies to hydropeaking waves based on a 2D hydraulic modeling approach. Physical habitat diversity,...

Aim of this work is to suggest a methodological approach for testing new and already established numerical morphodynamic models. The approach is based on a series of benchmark tests directly derived from analytical morphodynamic theories and has the primary aim to check which basic physical processes can be adequately reproduced by the numerical ap...

We study the numerical approximation of the two-dimensional morphodynamic model governed by the shallow water and Exner equations to simulate reach-scale two-dimensional morphodynamics of bedload-dominated alluvial rivers. The solution strategy relies on a full coupling of the governing equations within each time step. The resulting system of gover...

The morphodynamics of channelized river reaches is characterized by both steady and migrating bars. Steady bars are typically forced by planform non-uniformities, like localized discontinuities in channel curvature and/or width, or the presence of a bifurcation. On the contrary migrating bars result from an inherent free instability mechanism of th...

The morphodynamics of channelized river reaches is characterized by both steady and migrating bars. Steady bars are typically forced by planform non-uniformities, like localized discontinuities in channel curvature and/or width, or the presence of a bifurcation. On the contrary migrating bars result from an inherent free instability mechanism of th...