River Hydraulics and Ecological Management Under Climate Change
A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Water and Climate Change".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 November 2026 | Viewed by 95
Special Issue Editors
2. Civil Engineering Department, University for Business and Technology (UBT), Pristina, Kosovo
3. Civil Engineering Research and Innovation for Sustainability, Universidade de Lisboa, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
Interests: renewable energy; hydropower impacts; water management; ecohydrology; ecohydraulic; river restoration; climate change
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: hydromorphology; macrophytes; energy policy; water pollution; eutrophication; sediment; heavy metals; water quality; water management; sustainable development; environmental impact
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
A Grand Challenge at the Water–Climate–Ecosystem Nexus
Rivers are entering a new and largely uncharted regime of non-stationarity, where historical hydrological assumptions are rapidly collapsing under the pressure of climate change. Intensifying floods and droughts, disrupted sediment cascades, thermal stress, and ecological fragmentation are not isolated phenomena—they represent a systemic reorganization of riverine processes at regional to planetary scales.
However, current river management paradigms remain fundamentally outpaced by the rate and magnitude of change. The persistent separation between hydraulic engineering and ecological science has created critical blind spots, limiting our capacity to anticipate tipping points, quantify cascading risks, and design resilient interventions.
This Special Issue positions river systems as sentinels of global change and calls for a step-change in how we understand, model, and manage them.
Scope
We seek transformative contributions that move beyond incremental advances to redefine the state of the art. Priority will given to studies that
- Reveal emergent behaviors and thresholds in river systems under climate forcing;
- Quantify coupled hydrodynamic–ecological feedback across scales;
- Advance next-generation ecohydraulic modeling frameworks integrating physics, biology, and data science;
- Address sediment–flow–ecosystem co-evolution under altered hydroclimatic regimes;
- Reassess the role of hydraulic infrastructure in a climate-constrained world;
- Deliver scalable, transferable solutions for river restoration and basin management.
Frontier Research Directions
We explicitly encourage bold, cutting-edge interdisciplinary work that includes the following topics:
- AI-enhanced river science (e.g., machine learning, hybrid physics-AI models, digital twins);
- Global syntheses and comparative analyses revealing universal patterns and regional disparities;
- Nature-based and hybrid infrastructure evaluated under extreme and uncertain futures;
- Hydro-ecological resilience and tipping point detection;
- Integration of satellite Earth observation and high-resolution modeling for near-real-time river monitoring;
- Linking hydraulics to ecosystem services, biodiversity loss, and socio-economic risk.
Prof. Dr. Alban Kuriqi
Dr. Paweł Tomczyk
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- climate change
- river hydraulics
- ecohydraulics
- river ecology
- hydrological extremes
- environmental flows
- sediment transport
- river morphology
- hydraulic modeling
- river basin management
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