EGU2020-7057 https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-7057 EGU General Assembly 2020 © Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Ecological water demand in the typical polder of Dongting Lake Yi Cai1, Lihua Tang2, Dazuo Tian3, and Xiaoyi Xu4 1Tsinghua University, Institute of Hydrology and Water Resources (IHWR), Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Beijing,China (
[email protected]) 2Tsinghua University, Institute of Hydrology and Water Resources (IHWR), Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Beijing,China (
[email protected]) 3Hunan Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research,Changsha Hunan,China(
[email protected]) 4Hunan Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research,Changsha Hunan,China(
[email protected]) Dongting Lake is the largest lake in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River in China. After the completion of the Three Gorges Project, the relationship between the Yangtze River and Dongting Lake has a significant change with the decreased diversion ratio. Besides, due to the overexploitation of local human activities, some dry-up reaches appeared in the Dongting Lake region, especially in the polders with high strength human activities. In order to scientifically understand the evolution law of water resources in those protective embankments in lakeside areas, and understand the relationship between human activities and ecosystem stability, the study works on the ecological water demand that coupled with the ecological capacity of the environment. As a typical polder, the Yule polder is selected as a case study in the Dongting Lake region. The objective is to obtain the ecological water demand process which can maintain the requirements of water quantity and quality of water to maintain water ecological needs under the condition of significant human impacts.