Water abstraction licences, changes and exemptions
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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The Environment Agency’s National Framework for Water Resources challenges water companies to increase their environmental ambition and to take steps to proactively enhance the water environment. APEM developed the Hydro-Ecology Toolkit to analyse data across the water industry.
To support sustainable abstraction management, APEM was commissioned by the Environment Agency to package and improve its existing code for assembling, processing and analysing ecological monitoring and river flow data. The resulting Hydro-Ecology Toolkit is designed to be used by water companies, consultants and regulators to use to assess the ecological impacts of current and future water abstraction and drought.
Regional plans are being developed to identify and prioritise opportunities for restoring sustainable levels of abstraction to freshwater and wetland habitats. In addition, water companies are undertaking a programme of investigations to assess and mitigate existing ecological impacts of surface and groundwater abstraction.
Hydro-ecological models that quantify links between water resource pressures and ecology are urgently required given the potentially large financial investments that will be needed to protect these valuable ecosystems and services, now and in the future.
An overview of the tool
The Hydro-Ecology Toolkit is a library of open-source code that includes functions for:
The benefits
Developing and applying hydro-ecological models requires specialist programming skills and can be a laborious and time-consuming process. The Hydro-Ecology Toolkit makes this process more accessible and more efficient by streamlining and automating the process of assembling, processing and analysing ecological monitoring and river flow data.
The Hydro-Ecology Toolkit is publicly available to download from Github.
A vignette with worked examples guides users through the process of developing a hydro-ecological model from scratch.
The toolkit was rolled out in March 2023 via a series of training workshops, attended by over 50 delegates. The workshop videos and training materials can be accessed here.
The Toolkit seems very useful for automating processes towards producing hydro-ecological validation plots, and facilitating other analyses.
-Anonymous delegate.
Descriptions of the workflow and the details of the functions used were VERY clearly explained which was challenging given the complexity of the methods.
-Anonymous delegate.
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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APEM offers some tips for getting the most out of environmental monitoring data.
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Our team take a data-driven approach to environmental monitoring. Find out more in our tip sheet.
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