Dam safety assessments rely on the skill and experience of dam engineers but such expertise is not always easily transferred to new staff or conveyed in written reports. Many old dams have outlived their creators and puzzle those that see them for the first time. Eliane Alves Portela and Joao Bento explain how expert system technology can help avoid this DAM construction started over 2000 years...

Hydrologic regime plays a major role in structuring biotic diversity within river ecosystems by controlling key habitat conditions within the river channel and floodplain. Daily flow records from seven hydrological stations and the range of variability approach were utilized to investigate the variability and spatial pattern of the hydrologic alterations induced by the construction of the Three...

This paper conducts an assessment on the social-ecological resilience of China’s Dongting Lake (and its three sections – East, West and South Dongting Lake) in relation to the perturbations of the Three Gorges Dam using a set of resilience-based indicators. Expert scoring is applied to identify the different states of the lake and their resilience levels. Based on equal weighting for all indica...

it is correct control and monitoring of modern embankment dams that are very vital in the geotechniqual constructions. the improvement of methods of stability control, using the effective stress and the measurement of ganglionic water pressure in embankment dams cause more the safety for this kind of dams. nowedays there is such an idea that in stead of using of being safety factor against coas...

agh darreh tailing dam located in 23 km north of takab, west azarbayjan province is used for disposal of mine tailings. the tailing dam and its reservoir were constructed on gypsiferous marlstones. this is emphasis on geotechnical and environmental importance of the site. although construction of dams on gypsum rocks were not yet prohibited, but the dissolution of gypsum in contact with water i...

A dam ant colony optimization (D-ACO) analysis of the overall stability of high arch dams on complicated foundations is presented in this paper. A modified ant colony optimization (ACO) model is proposed for obtaining dam concrete and rock mechanical parameters. A typical dam parameter feedback problem is proposed for nonlinear back-analysis numerical model based on field monitoring deformation...

Today Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is known as one of the most important tools for decision makers in the construction of civil and industrial projects towards sustainable development. In the past, projects were evaluated based on cost and benefit analysis regardless of the physical and biological environmental effects and its socio-economical impacts. According to the Department of En...

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers are nowadays commonly used in monitoring applications, e.g., in estimating crustal and infrastructure displacements. This is basically due to the recent improvements in GNSS instruments and methodologies that allow high-precision positioning, 24 h availability and semiautomatic data processing. In this paper, GNSS-estimated displacements on a...