Significance of ecohydraulics in aquatic ecosystem protection

Ecohydraulics is an emerging interdisciplinary science and mainstream engineering researching on the interaction relationship between hydrodynamic characteristic and aquatic ecosystem, it integrates biology, geology, hydrology, morphology, ecology, engineering and other disciplines. Based on the collection of literature on ecohydraulics from Web of Science database, the bibliometric analysis on 563 literatures from the year 1991 to 2012 has been conducted, including publication year, author, country, institution, subject, source journal and keyword analysis. Some conclusions have been made that these literatures on ecohydraulics are growing exponentially year by year; these literature involves a lot of authors and forms three research groups which scattered in Britain, the United States and New Zealand, the result clearly shows a positive correlation between the number of published literatures and the length of the research history in this subject; the main institutions of these literature include United States Geological Survey, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Lyon and University of Birmingham; and the subjects of these literature include environmental sciences & ecology, water resources, marine & freshwater biology, engineering and other subjects; more than 40% of the literature published in journals with the impact factors greater than 2.0. The main research contents are as follow: biological characteristics of aquatic organism, the impact of hydrodynamics on river habitats and aquatic organisms and, the feedback of the organism on flow. Theoretical analysis, system testing, statistical analysis and hybrid analog-digital simulation are primary research techniques and applications of the research concentrate on environmental flow requirement, habitat assessment, eco-engineering design and flow field control.