Determination of ecological flow rate in streams using simple river model (SISMOD)

Rivers are fresh water resources being a crucial part of ecosystem providing many animals and plants with home ranges and meeting the needs in agriculture, drinking water, tourism, transportation, fishing, irrigation and energy. Rivers in Turkey differ in their structure and the amount of water circulated changes according to the seasons. That's why each resource should be evaluated based on the region, quality and quantity of water within the ecosystem. In that way, the ecological flow rate, the minimum mass flow rate, will be determined and the sustainability of the river basin ecosystem will be actualized. The projects and all the other work carried out on the rivers should have long term plans. Otherwise, wishing the quick results in a very short time may result in many problems such as not entegrating the current studies with the ecosystems and some other environmental and social negative results. In that study, the main techniques and approaches used to measure the amount of ecological flow rate based on worldwide scale and summarized. A known method is determination of ecological flow rate is used in a hypothetical stream with SISMOD model.