Daren M Carlisle, Ph.D.

Healthy streams and the fish and other organisms that live in them contribute to our quality of life. Extensive modification of the landscape in the Midwestern United States, however, has profoundly affected the condition of streams. Row crops and pavement have replaced grasslands and woodlands, streams have been straightened, and wetlands and fields have been drained. Runoff from...

The natural flow regime is critical to the health of riverine ecosystems. Many hydrologic metrics (HMs) have been developed to describe natural flow regimes, quantify flow alteration, and provide the hydrologic foundation for the development of environmental flow standards. Many applications require the use of models to predict expected natural values of HMs from basin characteristics at...

Protecting the health of streams and rivers requires identifying ecologically significant attributes of the natural flow regime. Streamflow regimes are routinely quantified using a plethora of hydrologic metrics (HMs), most of which have unknown relevance to biological communities. At regional and national scales, we evaluated which of 509 commonly used HMs were associated with...

In the Central United States, the Arkansas darter (Etheostoma cragini) is listed as a threatened fish species by the State of Kansas. Survival of the darter is threatened by loss of habitat caused by changing streamflow conditions, in particular flow depletion. Future management of darter populations and habitats requires an understanding of streamflow conditions and how those conditions...

Regional classification of streams is an early step in the Ecological Limits of Hydrologic Alteration framework. Many stream classifications are based on an inductive approach using hydrologic data from minimally disturbed basins, but this approach may underrepresent streams from heavily disturbed basins or sparsely gaged arid regions. An alternative is a deductive approach, using...

Because natural patterns of streamflow are a fundamental property of the health of streams, there is a critical need to quantify the degree to which human activities have modified natural streamflows. A requirement for assessing streamflow modification in a given stream is a reliable estimate of flows expected in the absence of human influences. Although there are many techniques to...