Francisco Martinez-Capel

Institute of research for the Integrated Management of Coastal Zones (IGIC) - Universitat Politècnica de València · Dep. of Hydraulic Engineering and Environment

Rivers have an intricate relationship with the vegetation that colonizes them. Riparian plants, capable of thriving within river corridors, both respond to and influence geomorphology. Yet interactions between river morphodynamics and vegetation tend to be context specific, making it challenging to generalize findings between locations. The current...

We investigated the relationship between benthic macroinvertebrate community attributes (richness, abundance, biodiversity, and climate-specific and resistance forms) and the physical characteristics of distinct mesohabitats (hydromorphological unit types) discretized into fast (e.g., riffles or rapids) and slow (e.g., pools or glides) flow types i...

Damming and flow regulation ensure water availability during dearth periods, but they cause impacts on inhabiting biota and facilitate the establishment of Invasive Alien Species (IAS). Setting environmental flows (e-flows) has proven fundamental to ensure good ecological status of rivers, battle IAS, and sustain ecosystem services. However, ongoin...

Highly regulated basins have traditionally required management practices to mitigate the negative environmental impacts and ensure human well-being. This paper proposes and assesses environmental and water supply deficit indicators to assist in the management of environmental flows (e-flows). For that, a water allocation model is applied, and hydro...

This work proposes a methodological approach applied to ephemeral gravel-bed streams to verify the change in the magnitude and frequency of hydrological events affecting the morphological dynamics and sediment budget in this type of channel. For the case study, the Azohía Rambla, located in southeastern Spain, was chosen, emphasizing the research o...

This work proposes a methodological approach applied to ephemeral gravel-bed streams to verify the change in the magnitude and frequency of hydrological events affecting the morphological dynamics and sediment budget in this type of channel. For the case study the Azohía Rambla, located in southeastern Spain, was chosen, emphasizing the research on...

Riparian ecosystems are highly dependent on feedbacks between vegetation dynamics and hydrogeomorphic components. Physical constraints on vegetation support a mosaic of heterogeneous habitats that support high biological diversity and provide many ecosystem services. Most European rivers have undergone anthropogenic alterations such as channelizati...

Hydropeaking negatively affects fish assemblages, but knowledge gaps still constrain our ability to rank and mitigate the impacts of different hydropower operation regimes at particular power plants. This is especially relevant for species and rivers for which the effects of hydropeaking are less investigated, such as the Iberian Cypriniformes and...

The adaptation to the multiple facets of climate/global change challenges the conventional means of water system planning. Numerous demand and supply management options are often available, from which a portfolio of adaptation measures needs to be selected in a context of high uncertainty about future conditions. A framework is developed to integra...

La contaminación difusa del río Serpis es una de sus principales problemáticas ambientales y que determinan su mal estado ecológico. Esta contaminación es consecuencia del uso excesivo de los compuestos químicos agrícolas (plaguicidas y fertilizantes) que, a su vez, son fácilmente arrastrados hasta el agua como consecuencia de la proximidad existen...

Sediment budgets and morphological channel adjustments are closely related to changes in stream power. In ephemeral channels, whose geomorphic response depends on the magnitude and frequency of hydrological events isolated in time, such relationships are often difficult to establish. This study sought to quantitatively relate morphological adjustme...

El proyecto REDAPTA, “Espacios de Gobernanza para la Adaptación al Cambio Global en Ríos Mediterráneos”, desarrolló sus actividades de forma simultánea en las cuencas de los ríos Tordera (Cataluña) y Serpis (Comunidad Valenciana). El proyecto trabajó en colaboración con dos “espacios de gobernanza”: la “Taula del Delta i de la Baixa Tordera” y la “...

Mapping the streambed morphology is crucial for understanding fluvial forms and processes, for advancing both our knowledge and best management practice of riverine systems. It is often done by wading streams but recently topobathymetric Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and imagery captured from airborne platforms are becoming promising and effe...

El canvi climàtic implica riscos significatius per als ecosistemes i per al benestar humà. A més de les conseqüències directes del canvi climàtic, hi ha moltes altres conseqüències combinades de diferents canvis ambientals derivats de les pressions humanes, per això parlem de canvi global. Reduir la vulnerabilitat d’un territori als impactes del ca...

Esta guía se ha desarrollado en el marco del proyecto REDAPTA “Espacios de Gobernanza para la Adaptación al Cambio Global en Ríos Mediterráneos” (septiembre 2019 - octubre 2020), concedido al CREAF, con la colaboración de la Universitat Politècnica de València, y que ha contado con el apoyo de la Fundación Biodiversidad, del Ministerio para la Tran...

Flow regime governs the structure of lotic ecosystems, both through formative events (i.e. floods and droughts) but also during ordinary flows when flow regulates the habitat availability. Consequently, changes in the frequency, magnitude, timing and duration of the different flows typically lead to remarkable changes on fish populations. Currently...

Stream power represents the rate of energy expenditure along a stream reach and can be calculated using topographic data acquired via structure-from-motion (SfM) photogrammetry and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). This study sought to quantitatively relate morphological adjustments in the Azohía Rambla, a gravel-bed ephemeral stream in southeaster...

Food security and water security in the Mediterranean are intrinsically linked and are facing similar challenges. Food security is threatened mainly by the high dependency of Mediterranean countries on food imports, making them vulnerable to external pressures such as volatile food prices. From a nutritional standpoint, the number of overweight and...

El proyecto REDAPTA consiste en el desarrollo de procesos participativos de co-diseño de medidas de adaptación al cambio global a través de espacios de gobernanza compuestos por actores de diferentes sectores de interés. En concreto, centra sus actividades en las cuencas de los ríos Tordera (Cataluña) y Serpis (Comunidad Valenciana) y pretende prom...

As a function of the dominant vegetation cover, patterns of variation in the structure and composition of both, the aquatic macroinvertebrate communities and their functional feeding groups (FFG) were examined at pristine streams of two high Andean micro-catchments of southern Ecuador. Ten sampling segments were defined in the study streams surroun...

In recent decades many studies have proven the paramount impact of flow regimes on the structure of lotic ecosystems, both through extreme events (i.e. floods and droughts) but also during intermediate flows, which temporarily and spatially regulate the habitat availability. Human demand for water is steadily increasing and scientists are challenge...

African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis Matschie, 1900) are ecological engineers that play a fundamental role in vegetation dynamics. The species is of immediate conservation concern, yet it is relatively understudied. To narrow this knowledge gap, we studied the drivers of daily movement patterns (linear displacements) of forest elephants—cha...

The characterization of riparian vegetation types is a key factor when modeling the behavior of the river and its evolution over the years. The main objective of this work was to configure an algorithm for the analysis and definition of vegetation types over a specific study area, the Serpis River (Valencia). For this, different methods of classifi...

To satisfy agricultural demands and to sustain the ecological status are frequently conflicting objectives, especially in a context of climate (decline of resources) and land use change (abandonment of farmland and increase on irrigation). Furthermore, flow regulation has fostered the presence of invasive species owing to their better adaptation to...

El río Serpis ha sido históricamente el eje vertebrador para el desarrollo poblacional, industrial y agrícola de las comarcas del Alcoià, el Comptat, y la Safor. Sin embargo, actualmente la población vive de espaldas al río, lo que ha supuesto su degradación. En el tramo final, esta problemática se materializa en la aparición de malos olores, resid...

Random Forests (RFs) and Gradient Boosting Machines (GBMs) are popular approaches for habitat suitability modelling in environmental flow assessment. However, both present some limitations theoretically solved by alternative tree-based ensemble techniques (e.g. conditional RFs or oblique RFs). Among them, eXtreme Gradient Boosting machines (XGBoost...

Spring-fed streams in Tokyo are important habitats for various aquatic species, whereas urbanization as well as introduction of invasive species is threatening the sustainability of such aquatic ecosystems. This study applies the System for Environmental Flow Analysis (SEFA) in a small urban river in Tokyo to assess the dynamics of the suitable hab...

Environmental flow assessment (EFA) involving microhabitat preference models is a common approach to set ecologically friendly flow regimes in territories with ongoing or planned projects to develop river basins, such as many rivers of Eastern Africa. However, habitat requirements of many African fish species are poorly studied, which may impair EF...

A fuzzy rule-based system combining empirical data on hydraulic preferences and literature information on temperature requirements was used to foresee the brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) spawning habitat degradation induced by climate change. The climatic scenarios for the Cabriel River (Eastern Iberian Peninsula) corresponded to two Representative C...

This study assessed the effects of hydrological events on aquatic communities at the mesohabitat scale (pool, run and riffle) in the high Andean region. Four headwater sites located in the Zhurucay microcatchment (southern Ecuador), with elevations higher than 3,500 m, were selected and monitored considering in each site a 50‐m‐long reach, and with...

This study assessed the effects of hydrological events on aquatic communities at the mesohabitat scale (pool, run and riffle) in the high Andean region. Four headwater sites located in the Zhurucay microcatchment (southern Ecuador), with elevations higher than 3,500 m, were selected and monitored considering in each site a 50-m-long reach, and with...

The expert-knowledge approach to develop fuzzy rule-based systems has been compared to three data-driven methods to model the microhabitat suitability for tree size classes of brown trout (Salmo trutta L.). The simultaneous optimisation of the fuzzy sets, membership functions and fuzzy rules presented the best training cross-validation performance...

This research project analysed the multiobjective optimization of the environmental flow regime under several global and climate change scenarios in the Serpis River (Eastern Spain), considering trends in water demands, best habitat for native fish species and low overlap of habitat with invasive fish species. This project had the support of Fundac...

Flow-ecology relationships, in terms of ecological response functions, between indicators of hydrological alteration and the fish and macroinvertebrate communities were explored in the Jucar River Basin district (eastern Iberian Peninsula), within the conceptual framework of the Ecological Limits of Hydrological Alteration (ELOHA). These relationsh...

The influences of habitat structure and hydraulics on tropical macroinvertebrate communities were investigated in two foothill rivers of the Udzungwa Mountains (United Republic of Tanzania) to assist future Environmental Flow Assessments (EFAs). Macroinvertebrate samples, hydraulic variables and habitat structure were collected at the microhabitat...

It is essential to understand the patterning of biota and environmental influencing factors for proper rehabilitation and management at the river basin scale. The Hun-Tai River Basin was extensively sampled four times for macroinvertebrate community and environmental variables during one year. Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) were used to reveal the agg...

We propose the novel integrated modelling procedure 3H-EMC for the determination of the environmental flow in rivers and streams; 3H-EMC combines Hydrological, Hydrodynamic and Habitat modelling with the use of the Environmental Management Classes (EMCs) that are defined by the Global Environmental Flow Calculator. We apply 3H-EMC in the Sperchios...

To study the spatial variations in vegetative roughness associated with morphological channel adjustments due to the presence of check dams in Mediterranean torrential streams, 18 channel sections, upstream and downstream of check dams, located in three pilot channel reaches of the Torrecilla stream (Betic Cordillera, southeast Spain) were monitore...

Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are flexible classification techniques suited to render trustworthy species distribution and habitat suitability models. Although several alternatives to improve PNNs' reliability and performance and/or to reduce computational costs exist, PNNs are currently not well recognised...

Supplement containing the detailed results from the simulations: expected relative seasonal changes in daily absolute precipitation (mm/day) and daily mean temperature (ºC) throughout the XXI century per meteorological station and each of the climate change studied scenarios, predicted daily mean air temperature; predicted daily mean streamflow, an...

Climate changes affect aquatic ecosystems by altering temperatures and precipitation patterns, and the rear edges of the distributions of cold-water species are especially sensitive to these effects. The main goal of this study was to predict in detail how changes in air temperature and precipitation will affect streamflow, the thermal habitat of a...

This research was conducted in the high-Andean basin of the Zhurucay River in southern Ecuador. In four river reaches 19 sampling campaigns were conducted per reach spread over a period of 35 months. The biotic samples were selected in the periods with greatest flow stability. Parallel to each sampling, 37 environmental variables grouped into three...

Climate change and river regulation are negatively impacting riparian vegetation. To evaluate these impacts, process-based models are preferred over data-driven approaches. However, they require extensive knowledge about ecohydrological processes. To facilitate the implementation of such process-based models, the key drivers of riparian woodland su...

This Special Issue includes ten articles that illustrate progresses and difficulties to bridge this gap. It gathers microhabitat-scale studies focused on the identification of major ecohydraulic mechanisms, reach-scale studies that typically target generality and transferability across reaches, and examples of catchment-scale management based on ge...

Climate change affects aquatic ecosystems altering temperature and precipitation patterns, and the rear edge of the distribution of cold-water species is especially sensitive to them. The main goal was to predict in detail how change in air temperature and precipitation will affect streamflow, the thermal habitat of a cold-water fish (brown trout,...

Competition with invasive species is recognized as having a major impact on biodiversity conservation. The upper part of the Cabriel River (Eastern Iberian Peninsula) harbours the most important population of the Júcar nase (Parachondrostoma arrigonis; Steindachner, 1866), a fish species in imminent danger of extinction. Currently, this species coh...

The impacts of invasive species are recognised as a major threat to global freshwater biodiversity. The risk of invasion (probability of presence) of two avowed invasive species, the northern pike (Esox Lucius, L.) and bleak (Alburnus alburnus, L.), was evaluated in the upper part of the Cabriel River (eastern Iberian Peninsula). Habitat suitabilit...

Inconsistent performance of Species Distribution Models (SDMs), which may depend on several factors such as the initial conditions or the applied modelling technique, is one of the greatest challenges in ecological modelling. To overcome this problem, ensemble modelling combines the forecasts of several individual models. A commonly applied ensembl...

La presente investigación se realizó en una cuenca altoandina al sur del Ecuador, con el objeto de determinar los principales factores ambientales que influyen en la variación espacial de los macroinvertebrados acuáticos de los órdenes EPT (Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera), en ríos de cabecera. Para ello, se seleccionaron cuatro tramos de 50...

The Zambezi-Chobe wetlands in Namibia are of great international importance for trans-boundary water management because of their remarkable ecological characteristics and the variety and magnitude of the ecosystem services provided. The main objective of this study is to establish the hydro-ecological baseline for the application of environmental f...

The invasion of freshwater ecosystems is a particularly alarming phenomenon in the Iberian Peninsula. Habitat suitability modelling is a proficient approach to extract knowledge about species ecology and to guide adequate management actions. Decision-trees are an interpretable modelling technique widely used in ecology, able to handle strongly nonl...

During the last two decades, studies of brown trout habitat selection have been conducted across the Iberian Peninsula. The subsequent habitat suitability (probability of presence) models allowed the application of the physical habitat simulation (or habitat evaluation), which is commonly a fundamental step in environmental flow assessment. However...

The invasion of freshwater ecosystems is a particularly alarming phenomenon in the Iberian Peninsula. Habitat suitability modelling is a proficient approach to extract knowledge about species ecology and to guide adequate management actions. Decision-trees are an interpretable modelling technique widely used in ecology, able to handle strongly nonl...

Streamflow and temperature regimes are well-known to influence on the availability of suitable physical habitat for instream biological communities. General Circulation Models (GCMs) have predicted significant changes in timing and geographic distribution of precipitation and atmospheric temperature for the ongoing century. However, differences in...

Habitat suitability models (HSM) are concerned with the abundance or distribution of species as a consequence of interactions with the physical environment. Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) were used to model brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) density as a function of environmental variables at the scale of river reach and hydromorphological units (HM...

The impact of climate change on the habitat suitability for large brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) was studied in a segment of the Cabriel River (Iberian Peninsula). The future flow and water temperature patterns were simulated at a daily time step with M5 models' trees (NSE of 0.78 and 0.97 respectively) for two short-term scenarios (2011-2040) under...

This study is aimed at forecasting the changes in the suitability of brown trout habitat (Salmo trutta L.), caused by alterations in the stream temperature and the flow regime under climate change scenarios. The stream temperature and instantaneous flow in several streams in Central Spain were modelled from daily temperature and precipitation data....

The physical habitat simulation plays an important role in environmental flow assessments, being integrated in different methodological frameworks. Some of these methodologies present analysis at different scales, but the applications of mesoscale habitat simulation are not very extended. Some of the difficulties for their global application are th...

The impact of climate change in the suitable habitat available for the large brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) was studied in a segment of the Cabriel River (eastern Iberian Peninsula) by coupling a Témez rainfall-runoff model calibrated for the 1960-2000 period (NSE: 0.72), a River-2D hydraulic model and an ensemble of five machine learning techniques...

The physical habitat simulation sub-routine of the Instream Flow Incremental Methodology (IFIM) uses hydraulic modeling and suitability indices of target fish species to predict how differences in-stream flows affect the microhabitat occupation by fish species. This habitat modelling approach was adopted to assess the ecological effects of running...

Many rules of dam operation aims at regulating the river flow on a seasonal and daily scale in order to supply energy in the demands peaks as well as in the dry season. This regulation changes the water characteristics and the aquatic eco-systems, producing alterations in matter and energy cycle, habitat availability, and in the integrity of the ec...