Increased environmental concerns related to the impacts of roads on ecosystems have expanded to include the issue offish migration disruption by culverts. Recent research suggests that fish use the reduced velocity zones within the culvert boundary layers to minimize their energy expenditures. This work seeks to incorporate those findings into the prioritization of culvert retrofitting and replacements. Specifically, it is intended to create a post-processing tool for HEC-RAS 4.1 (Brunner, 2010), that would perform: 1) recovery of culvert simulation outputs from unsteady hydrologic simulations within the stream network; 2) cross sectional velocity variation reconstruction within the culvert using analytical expressions such as the one presented by Ead et al. (2000) thus allowing us to recreate the reduced velocity zones; and 3) evaluation of particular fish swimming performance in terms of the velocity and dimensions of the reduced velocities zones within the culvert. Ultimately, this post-processing tool will allow for a better evaluation of the permanence of adequate fish crossing conditions for a particular species, over a desired period.
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