My masters thesis involved work in three areas:

  • Theory and representation of the benefit of environmental flows in a mathematical model
  • Downscaling ecosystem information to the stream-reach scale in order to support estimation of environmental benefit
  • Running an evolutionary algorithm to look at the tradeoff curves (Pareto front) of environment vs economic uses with the then-current draft natural flow regime data.

Read the thesis

The thesis itself can be found here: Estimating Tradeoffs in Environmental Flows with Evolutionary Algorithms – Full Thesis

Presentations

Two presentations on the thesis are below. The first is a short version given at a conference, the California Water and Environmental Modeling Forum’s 2020 meeting, and the long-version to Jay Lund’s lab group. Both audiences are familiar with California water issues and optimization algorithms (generally), so some details are skipped.

Slides for the long-version can be found here: Santos – Estimating Tradeoffs in Environmental Flows with Evolutionary Algorithms – Slides

Short presentation at CWEMF 2020.

Long version to Jay Lund’s lab group

Code

The software I wrote for this thesis can be found in two locations: