Translation of Environmental Flow Research in Cambodia (TEFRIC) is an inter-disciplinary project funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council’s NERC Innovation Follow-on Programme. The project is led by the UCL Department of Geography with partners in the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in UK, the Faculty of Hydrology and Water Resources Engineering of the Institute of Technology of Cambodia (ITC) and the Tonle Sap Authority (TSA). The project is designed to introduce state-of-the-art environmental flow approaches to Cambodia and to initiate their application in the wider Mekong River Basin.
The main aim of the project is to develop a documented, user-friendly open-access version of the Ecological Risk due to Flow Alteration (ERFA) environmental flow methodology using the R programming language with shiny. This approach has been applied by CEH and UCL to a number of river systems using default values for the various metrics that in turn provide an assessment of the potential impacts of ecological change due to alternative future scenarios. These values, which are primarily associated with the magnitude of change from a historical or baseline situation can, however, be fine-tuned so that ERFA projections of risk of change match expert knowledge. Working with local expert TEFRIC will aim to develop such pre-defined settings for the Cambodian situation using a range of scenarios established through Mekong-wide hydrological / hydraulic modelling.
On 18th July 2018, TEFRIC project has organized Workshop for introducing the project and the development of ERFA model.
Dr. Sarann Ly, Dean of Faculty, opened the workshop by giving a brief notice speech and gave the chance to the floor to introduce and get familiar among each participant. Dr. Julian Thompson and Dr. Cedric Laize are the trainers of the workshop, and 15 participants from various organizations attended the workshop. The participants are lecturers, researchers, as well as, officers from various institute, university, organization such as ITC, TSA, World Fish Organization, Conservation International, Royal University of Agriculture (RUA), University of Battambang (UBB), MOWRAM, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), etc. During a full fruitful day of the workshop and discussion, the fundamental concept and introduction of environmental flow model are disseminated. The major aim of the discussion is to fine tune the ERFA methodology to the Cambodia situation, and identify Cambodian catchments and appropriate scenarios for application of ERFA.
This workshop is the first among three workshops proposed in the project. The feedback during the discussion from the participant are precious components for the future development and improvement of the model in a broader holistic approach to deal with environmental flow.
