AbstractsGeography &GIS

River systems, as a major component of the water environment, have the most interactions with human beings in many ways, especially along with social development and population growth, as well as the intense utilization of the river systems by humans, a series of major ecological environmental problems have arisen in recent years. Therefore, river system regulation and management has become a crucial focus point of research. Although the integrated river management is the preferred and most commonly accepted method that is applied in water resources management, a significant problem is that there is a shortage of integrated river ecological research which focuses specifically on urban rivers. The current problems governing urban river regulation and ecological status rehabilitation can be summarised into the following points: The definitions of urban and rural rivers are still not clarified; Interactions between urban and rural rivers are neglected; Need for an applicable mapping method for driving the urban river health index; Limited availability of input data sources, especially in the developing world for assessment and management of environmental problems. This research aims to study on the above addressed issues, to clarify the characteristics of urban rivers and to find an applicable method of assessing their health status. In this PhD research, the identification of urban and rural river reaches is studied as the first main purpose, a generic conceptual model namely the Urban-Rural River Continuum Identification System (URRCI) is developed. Reference of this system is to review the classification of urbanization, in order to distinguish whether the surveyed river section belongs to urban river or rural river, and further to solve the problem of the unclear definition of urban rivers. The second important issue has been addressed in this PhD research is to focus on urban river regulation, aiming to set up an advanced urban river ecological health assessment system which can be applied easily. The case study area of Shenzhen River in China has been selected to build up the database in order to establish and prove this new improved river health assessment system, and simulate effective rehabilitation measurements scenarios. The fuzzy logic approach is integrated into the fish habitat model CASiMiR, which is developed at the University of Stuttgart, Institute for Modelling Hydraulic and Environmental Systems, and is receiving a continuously growing acceptance in Europe and worldwide. The customized tool took advantage of an existing fuzzy inference calculator, which is integrated within the ArcGIS, thereby allowing direct data integration from various geospatial sources as input parameters and the presentation of output in the form of spatial and temporal maps. Indeed, the system of fuzzy rules (rulebase) can contain more than one input and one output parameter. The interaction between the urban river reach and the rural river reach is also identified as the third addressed objective. The integrated health…