The ecohydraulics paradigm shift: IAHR enters a New Era

Ecohydraulics forms a new multidiscipline that derives from the ever growing needs for water use and a global preoccupation for the survival of natural riverine ecosystems. The greatest challenge ever posed to hydraulicians is to harmonize the design and management of water works with the ecological components of rivers, floodplains and estuaries. While already pre-sent in the IAHR agenda for several decades through fish passage facilities or compensating measures for environmental impacts of civil works, new trends appeared during the last dec-ade based on new public policies (e.g. European Water Management Framework Directive, integrated management at the basin scale), practices and regulations that require from de-signers and managers an enlarged account of environmental preoccupations including conservation flow regimes, modeling of riverine habitats, restoration of natural ecosystems. Acknowledging the urgent need for a new paradigm regarding the cohabitation of water uses and the natural components of hydrosystems, IAHR launched in 1993 a series of confer-ences on habitat hydraulics in Trondheim, Norway (1994). In 1996 at the second ecohydraulics conference in Quebec, a fully-fledged section on Ecohydraulics was created within IAHR. Five international conference events spread over three continents up to now have been held and the topics have continuously grown in importance. This note reports on the genesis of this movement within IAHR, its underlying vision and its recent evolution.