| Research topics |
- Environmental flows assessment:
 Defining environmental flows (e-flows) is necessary to inform managers and develop the regional-scale water planning. We developed a e-flow assessment methodology considers hydrological and morphological aspects in defining e-flows for environmental river management. In particular, the assessment of e-flows considers how fluvial habitats are effectively shaped by the combined interaction of water, sediments, woody/organic material and riparian vegetation, trying to broaden the current e-flow concept and to consider geomorphological river changes when specifying e-flows.
- Sustainable hydropower:
 My research activities are focused on developing models and tools for sustainable hydropower production. The main results and impacts of the research is a methodological approach widely applied in Italy and abroad to maximize energy production and minimize environmental impacts due to hydropower generation, hydropeaking, sediment flushing from reservoirs.
- Biological response to hydrodynamics:
 I started to study biological response to hydrodynamics since 2007. My contribution in this field consists of species distribution models for a particular target species, life stage or guilds. Multivariate predictive models have been developed for different water-related organisms in Italy, Spain and Greece. Statistical analyses are performed for one or more rivers simultaneously considering chemical, physical and biological habitat descriptors. The analysis is performed with different techniques (e.g., Random Forests, Artificial Neural Networks, Logistic Regressions) to identify the habitat characteristics mostly used by the target species.
- Fluvial hydraulics and river restoration:
 In the last ten years I have collaborated in several research projects framed in different European countries (Italy, Spain, UK, Latvia, Sweden) as well as in Latin America, Asia and Africa to study diverse aspects of river restoration, conservation of aquatic ecosystems and water resources management. I also had an active role in projects focused on hydropower production, evaluating the impacts of flow regulation on the aquatic community and assessing the effectiveness of different river restoration measures.
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/paolo.vezza)
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