About Institute of Hydroecology, Ministry of Water Resources and Chinese Academy of Sciences

Institute of Hydroecology, Ministry of Water Resources and Chinese Academy of Sciences

The Institute of Hydroecology, Ministry of Water Resources and Chinese Academy of Sciences, is a joint research institute in Wuhan, Hubei Province, co-sponsored by China's Ministry of Water Resources and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Founded in 1987 as the Institute of Reservoir Fisheries, it studies the ecological and environmental consequences of water construction projects — above all the great dams and reservoirs of the Yangtze River basin — and the restoration of the aquatic ecosystems those projects affect. It is a distinct institute from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Hydrobiology, also in Wuhan and covered separately in this directory: where the Institute of Hydrobiology is an academy institute devoted broadly to freshwater organisms, the Institute of Hydroecology carries a ministry-and-academy mandate tied directly to water-resources management, reservoir fisheries and the ecological protection of rivers and lakes.

Founding in 1987 as the Institute of Reservoir Fisheries

According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Wuhan Branch, the Institute of Hydroecology, Ministry of Water Resources and Chinese Academy of Sciences — originally named the Institute of Reservoir Fisheries, Ministry of Water Resources and Chinese Academy of Sciences — was founded in 1987 and is located in Wuhan City, Hubei Province. The original name records its founding purpose: China was building large reservoirs at pace, and the fisheries of those new artificial lakes, together with the ecological changes impoundment brought, needed a dedicated research body answering both to the water ministry that built the projects and to the academy that supplied the science. The later renaming from reservoir fisheries to hydroecology mirrors the institute's widening remit, from managing fish production in reservoirs to assessing and repairing the ecological impacts of hydraulic engineering across whole river systems.

Joint Sponsorship and Place in the Wuhan Research Cluster

Dual sponsorship by the Ministry of Water Resources and the Chinese Academy of Sciences is written into the institute's full name and shapes its work. It is listed among the institutes of the academy's Wuhan Branch alongside the Institute of Hydrobiology, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan Botanical Garden and other Wuhan academy units, and it appears as a distinct member in the Chinese Academy of Sciences library consortium lists. At the same time it answers to the water-resources system: its key laboratory is a Ministry of Water Resources laboratory, its innovation team belongs to the Changjiang — Yangtze — Water Resources Commission, and its animal-research ethics approvals are issued in its own name as the Institute of Hydroecology, abbreviated IHE. This dual identity positions the institute at the junction between the engineers who plan and operate China's water projects and the ecologists who measure what those projects do to rivers.

Staff, Departments and Facilities

The Wuhan Branch profile records that the institute had a total of 97 staff members, of whom nine were research professors, 31 associate research professors and 38 assistant or junior scientists. It was organised into four departments, a central laboratory and an experimental base, together with a company for the supervision of resettlement and a publishing office for the journal Reservoir Fisheries, which appeared bimonthly. The Expert Committee for Fisheries of the Chinese Hydraulic Engineering Society was affiliated with the institute. The resettlement-supervision company is a distinctive feature: large Chinese water projects displace communities as well as ecosystems, and the institute's structure reflects a remit that has always joined ecological science to the practical administration of reservoir regions. Its address is 578 Xiongchu Avenue, Wuhan, Hubei, postcode 430079, and its researchers publish under that Wuhan 430079 affiliation across the international water and fisheries literature.

The Key Laboratory of Ecological Impacts of Hydraulic Projects

The institute hosts the Key Laboratory of Ecological Impacts of Hydraulic-Projects and Restoration of Aquatic Ecosystem of the Ministry of Water Resources, the laboratory named in the affiliations of much of its recent research. The laboratory's name states the institute's central scientific question with unusual directness: what ecological impacts do hydraulic projects cause, and how can affected aquatic ecosystems be restored? Its facilities support experimental as well as field science; published studies describe work carried out in the laboratory's rooms and flumes in Wuhan, including fish swimming and respirometry experiments conducted there in the summer of 2019 on crucian carp, examining anaerobic metabolism as fish approach their critical swimming speed — the kind of physiological measurement used to design fish passages that real fish can actually swim through. The institute also hosts the Innovation Team of the Changjiang Water Resources Commission for River and Lake Ecosystem Restoration Key Technology, tying its laboratory directly to the river-basin authority for the Yangtze.

Research Mission: Ecology in the Age of Water Construction

The institute's own summary of its mission is that it focuses on both basic and applied research related to the ecological and environmental issues which result from water construction projects, with the aim of supporting a sustainable development strategy in China. That mission has made the Yangtze its principal field site. The Yangtze is at once China's greatest fishery river, the site of the Three Gorges and Gezhouba dams and a cascade of upstream hydropower stations, and the focus of a ten-year fishing ban introduced in 2020 after wild fish populations declined under overfishing, habitat fragmentation, land reclamation and pollution. Institute researchers work on how dams fragment habitats, hinder fish migration and damage spawning and nursery sites, and on the evidence base managers need to protect the river's aquatic life while its water infrastructure operates.

Mapping Yangtze Fish Diversity with Environmental DNA

A 2026 study led by institute researchers shows the scale of its current field science. Using environmental DNA metabarcoding — identifying fish from DNA traces in water samples — the team sampled 115 sites across the whole Yangtze River basin in March and April 2024: 42 in the upper reaches, 21 in the Three Gorges Reservoir area and 52 downstream. The study assessed fish diversity in terms of richness, divergence and regularity, examined how fish communities assemble, and measured the effects of the Three Gorges Dam and of the early years of the ten-year fishing ban on fish assemblages in each region. Its analysis found stochastic processes, especially dispersal limitation and drift, dominant in community assembly across all three regions, with their relative importance differing significantly in the reservoir area — precisely the kind of basin-wide, dam-aware evidence the institute exists to produce for evidence-based management of Yangtze fish biodiversity.

Genomics and the Management of Yangtze Fish Stocks

Institute scientists also work at the level of genes and populations. A population genomic survey of silver carp in the Yangtze River basin, authored from the institute's key laboratory, sampled 17 Yangtze sites plus one United States population of this globally invasive species and used RAD sequencing to generate more than 750,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms for analyses of genetic structure and linkage disequilibrium. Because the middle Yangtze is critical spawning habitat for silver carp and wild populations have declined for decades, the study's results were framed as guidance for management: conserving connectivity between populations while protecting distinct genetic units, with particular sites identified as needing targeted management. Related institute-affiliated work on the Three Gorges Reservoir has used stable isotopes to study how an invading pelagic fish, Coilia brachygnathus, which colonised the reservoir from the middle and lower Yangtze, alters the trophic niches of native species — research that connects dam-created habitats to invasion ecology in one of the world's largest reservoirs.

Fish Passage, Barriers and Protected Species

Much of the institute's applied work concerns helping fish move — or stopping them moving — around hydraulic structures. Its researchers have tested pulsed direct-current fish barriers in a 50-metre flume, measuring how pulse frequency and water velocity determine whether bighead carp and common carp cross an electric barrier, work aimed at guiding fish toward suitable waters and fishways; the experiments were approved by the institute's own Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and supported by national research programmes and China Yangtze Power. The institute's director general Chang Jianbo presented work on successfully stimulating gonad maturation in freshwater-reared Chinese sturgeon, Acipenser sinensis, by controlling the annual temperature pattern — research directed at the conservation breeding of one of the Yangtze's most endangered fishes. Institute scientists joined colleagues from the Institute of Hydrobiology and the Network of Aquaculture Centres in Asia-Pacific at a Wuhan consultation on fisheries and aquaculture in Asian lakes and reservoirs, where lake and reservoir fisheries development, stock enhancement and the ecosystem approach to fisheries management were documented for the region.

Publishing, Professional Societies and Continuing Role

The institute's publishing office produced the journal Reservoir Fisheries, appearing bimonthly, a legacy of its founding identity that continued to serve China's reservoir and lake fisheries community, and the affiliation of the Expert Committee for Fisheries of the Chinese Hydraulic Engineering Society placed the institute at the centre of professional fisheries practice within the hydraulic engineering world. Its staff participate in the wider Wuhan aquatic-science community, including the Hubei Society of Oceanology and Limnology, whose symposia on water environment health and ecological restoration bring the institute together with Wuhan's universities and academy institutes. From 97 staff in Wuhan, the Institute of Hydroecology occupies a specific and durable niche in Chinese science: the institute charged, jointly by the water ministry and the academy, with understanding what the country's vast programme of water construction does to its rivers and lakes, and with finding the means — fishways, barriers, stock protection, restoration technology — to repair it.