APEM’s innovations of 2021
APEM’s team have been busy in 2021 innovating and making advancements to support clients and their projects across the world.
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In times of warmer weather and unusually low rainfall, water companies in England can apply to the Environment Agency (EA) for a Drought Permit. This alters the usual limits on water abstraction licenses to help mitigate the effects of drought on public water supplies.
2022 has been a particularly difficult year with droughts declared by many of England’s water companies.
Predicting the environmental effects of Drought Permits on specific rivers is a significant challenge for many water companies, especially where historical monitoring data is inadequate to indicate the impact of previous droughts.
The application for a Drought Permit must include an assessment of the likely environmental impacts. To support these assessments, the EA developed a prototype statistical regression model to predict how the ecology of rivers might change under a Drought Permit scenario.
Building on this work, APEM was commissioned to review and refine the model and operationalise it in the form of an interactive web-based application. The new Hydro-Ecology Model (HEM) uses the open-source R shiny package which utilises advances statistical modelling techniques and makes the app automatically adaptable to desktop and mobile devices.
Roadford Lake, Devon in November 2022, where you can see the tide mark on the water tower, indicating how low the levels are despite significant rainfall
The HEM helps users to understand the relationship between historical flow and ecological response. This can be on a site-by-site basis where longer time series of data already exist. It can also help overcome the limitations of site-by-site assessments by integrating data from the site of interest with monitoring data from similar sites on other rivers.
To aid decision making, the HEM demonstrates how to predict the magnitude of possible ecological impacts under future drought scenarios. Importantly, the tool provides an audit trail of the assessment in the form of an interactive HTML report, which can be submitted as part of the regulatory process of applying for a Drought Permit.
Contact us to find out more about how HEM can support you.
A typical view of how data is presented and modelled using the HEM Tool
APEM’s team have been busy in 2021 innovating and making advancements to support clients and their projects across the world.
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APEM offers some tips for getting the most out of environmental monitoring data.
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Water abstraction rules have changed, and more changes are on their way. Here’s how APEM can help you negotiate the licences, changes and exemptions.
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