Due to the growing wish and necessity to simulate the possible effects of climate change on the discharge regime on large rivers such as the Rhine in Europe, there is a need for well performing hydrological models that can be applied in climate change scenario studies. There exists large variety in available models and there is an ongoing debate in research on rainfall-runoff modelling on wheth...

This paper presents a novel framework that links imprecision (through a fuzzy approach) and stochastic uncertainty (through a Bayesian approach) in estimating flood probabilities from historical flood information and systematic flood discharge data. The method exploits the linguistic characteristics of historical source material to construct membership functions, which may be wider or narrower,...

The Rhine River Delta is crucial to the Dutch economy. The Maeslant barrier was built in 1997 to protect the Rhine estuary, with the city and port of Rotterdam, from storm surges. This research takes a simple approach to quantify the influence of the Maeslant storm surge barrier on design water levels behind the barrier. The dikes in the area are supposed to be able to withstand these levels. E...

[1] The hydrological regime of the Rhine basin is expected to shift from a combined snowmelt-rainfall regime to a more rainfall-dominated regime because of climate change, leading to more extreme flood peaks and low flows. Land use changes may reinforce the effects of this shift through urbanization or may counteract them through, for example, afforestation. In this study, we investigate the ef...

Non-indigenous species that become invasive are one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide. In various freshwater systems in Europe, populations of native amphipods and fish are progressively displaced by highly adaptive non-indigenous species that can perform explosive range extensions. A total of 40 Ponto-Caspian round gobies Neogobius melanostomus from the Rhine River near Düssel...

Freshwater ecosystems are increasingly impacted by alien invasive species which have the potential to alter various ecological interactions like predator-prey and host-parasite relationships. Here, we simultaneously examined predator-prey interactions and parasitization patterns of the highly invasive round goby (Neogobius melanostomus) in the rivers Rhine and Main in Germany. A total of 350 N....

A relatively simple unsteady flow model was proposed which estimates velocities, friction factors and the components of discharge in the main channel and on the floodplains simultaneously. Bottom roughness of the main channel and the floodplains, the flow resistance of vegetation on the floodplains and the flow resistance caused by the momentum transfer between the main channel and the floodpla...

In order to investigate the estrogenic activities of two municipal sewage treatment plant (STP; sites A and B) effluents and of Rhine water sampled at Worms (site C; Rhine-Neckar triangle, Germany), data from in situ experiments measuring hepatic vitellogenin expression from caged rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) were compared with data from in vitro bioassays (yeast estrogen screen [YES], E...

The first record of the quagga mussel Dreissena rostriformis bugensis (Andrusov, 1897) in Germany is described. This species has expanded its distribution area in Europe at a slower rate than the zebra mussel Dreissena polymorpha (Pallas, 1771). Recent records from the Danube in Romania and from an enclosed Rhine-Meuse estuary in The Netherlands, suggest that the MainDanube canal and River Rhin...