Here we provide the analysis of the environmental impact of a "run-of-river" hydropower plant on the riverine ecosystem of the Saldur stream, a glacier-fed stream located in the Italian Central-Eastern Alps.

This analysis is associated with the paper: Small hydropower – small ecological footprint? A multi-annual environmental impact analysis using aquatic macroinvertebrates as bioindicators. Part 1: effects on community structure.

You can view the analysis HTML reports at this GitHub Pages link.

Alternatively, you can download or clone the repository then run the scripts using the Saldur-ROR-analysis.Rproj file (R and R Studio are needed).

For cloning, run the following command in a terminal (first, git should be installed):

git clone https://github.com/valentinitnelav/Saldur-ROR-analysis

The original data are hosted by "PANGAEA - Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental Science". The data repository is located here.

From this original file we derived all the data files included and stored in our GitHub repository in the ./data folder.

You can either read the analysis at this GitHub Pages link, or if you prefer to download or clone the repository, then:

• the analysis of similarities, spatial and temporal beta-diversity calculations, and indicator taxa analysis are presented in the script analysis/anosim_beta_multipatt.R.

• the Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) analysis using the GLMM framework is documented in the directory analysis/baci_glmm. You can open and read the html reports in your browser. Each report corresponds to the following variables of interest:

  • taxonomic richness (N0) -- baci-n0.html (generated from baci-n0.Rmd);
  • density (individuals/m2) -- baci-density.html (generated from baci-density.Rmd);
  • % Ephemeroptera–Plecoptera–Tricoptera (% EPT) -- baci-ept.html (generated from baci-ept.Rmd);
  • Shannon evenness (Hill’s ratio, E10) -- baci-e10.html (generated from baci-e10.Rmd);
  • Simpson evenness (Hill’s ratio, E20) -- baci-e20.html (generated from baci-e20.Rmd).

See LICENSE file in this repository.