Culvert design for aquatic organism passage: an enviromental approach

Abstract

The design of culverts at the crossroads of roads and streams such as streams or rivers, has traditionally been based on the hydraulic safety requirements for the road. With this conception of the sewer design, the biological elements of the water stream, such as fish and other aquatic organisms, which are an essential part of the ecosystem and which have been altered by a physical barrier that is the sewer, have been left without consideration. Thinking about environmentally friendly design, concepts and guidelines have been developed for the design of culverts to cross roads and streams, which facilitate the passage of aquatic organisms through the culvert, so that these can have mobility in the same way as in the natural stream. In this paper some guidelines for the design of culverts in an environmentally friendly way are presented, which are addressed by Kilgore et al (2010), Schall at al. (2012), Bates and Kirn (2009), Henrik et al (2019), Kozarek and Mielke (2015), Olson et al (2017), and Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife (2016).