A Landscape‐Based Regionalization of Natural Flow Regimes in the Ebro River Basin and Its Biological Validation

Abstract

Abstract Flow prediction in ungauged basins is an important task for water resources planning and management, and remains a fundamental challenge for hydroecological research. Based on a previous classification of streams and rivers in the Ebro River basin (Spain), where six natural flow‐regime types were identified, we apply a new predictive approach of the flow regime type based on climatic and physiographic descriptors. We used a set of easily available environmental variables as discriminant parameters: annual precipitation, annual evapotranspiration, annual air temperature, elevation, catchment area, drainage density and geology. A stepwise landscape‐based classification procedure consisting of several stepwise discriminant analyses and canonical discriminant analyses allocated a set of sites with poor or no natural flow data into the flow types defined. Misclassification rates obtained by cross‐validation ranged between 1.12% and 11.9%. Additionally, the ecological soundness of the proposed regionalization was tested by the concordance between macroinvertebrate communities and the proposed classification using NMDS and ANOSIM. NMDS resulted in a clear separation of sites into five NFR classes with available macroinvertebrate data, and ANOSIM found significant differences in macroinvertebrate communities among classes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.