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In many areas of the world, flood risk assessment is either out of date or completely lacking. In Quebec (Canada), one of the challenges to map flood risk is the very large territory combined with very few datasets on river bathymetry, which are required to run hydraulic models. The objective of this study is to assess the precision and accuracy of 2D flood hydraulic modelling exclusively based on LiDAR elevation data which do not include information on in-channel river bathymetry. Hydraulic simulations (HEC-RAS 5.0) are carried out, for discharges of 20-, 100- and 500-year recurrence intervals, using two techniques that do not require bathymetry data, either subtracting discharge of the LiDAR survey from the flood discharge or estimating flow depth from the water surface slope. These techniques are compared to a traditional approach using bed topography obtained from detailed field surveys, on two long reaches (several kilometers). Sensitivity tests were conducted to assess the impacts of the main sources of error on simulated flood levels. Results show that both techniques can be applied with limited introduction of error in the modelled flood stages, and that errors are greatly reduced if calibration data are available.

River confluences are characterized by a complex mixing zone with three-dimensional turbulent structures, which can be affected by the presence of an ice cover during the winter. The objective of this study is to characterize the flow structure in the mixing zone at a medium-size (~ 40 m) river confluence with and without an ice cover. Detailed velocity profiles were collected under the ice along the mixing plane with an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter. For the ice-free conditions, drone imagery was used to characterize the mixing layer structures for various flow stages. Results indicate that during the ice-free conditions, very large Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) coherent structures are visible due to turbidity differences, and occupy up to 50% of the width of the parent channel. During winter, the ice cover affects velocity profiles by moving the highest velocities towards the center of the profiles. Large turbulent structures are visible in both the streamwise and lateral velocity components. The strong correlation between these velocity components indicates that KH vortices are the dominating coherent structures in the mixing zone. A spatio-temporal conceptual model is presented to illustrate the main differences on the three-dimensional flow structure at the river confluence with and without the ice cover.

As part of the ecological risk assessment associated with radionuclides in freshwater ecosystems, toxicity of waterborne uranium was recently investigated in the microcrustacean Daphnia magna over a three-generation exposure (F0, F1, and F2). Toxic effects on daphnid life history and physiology, increasing over generations, were demonstrated at the organism level under controlled laboratory conditions. These effects were modeled using an approach based on the dynamic energy budget (DEB). For each of the three successive generations, DEBtox (dynamic energy budget applied to toxicity data) models were fitted to experimental data. Lethal and sublethal DEBtox outcomes and their uncertainty were projected to the population level using population matrix techniques. To do so, we compared two modeling approaches in which experimental results from F0, F1, and F2 generations were either considered separately (F0-, F1-, and F2-based simulations) or together in the actual succession of F0, F1, and F2 generations (multi-F-based simulation). The first approach showed that considering results from F0 only (equivalent to a standard toxicity test) would lead to a severe underestimation of uranium toxicity at the population level. Results from the second approach showed that combining effects in successive generations cannot generally be simplified to the worst case among F0-, F1-, and F2-based population dynamics.