One of the latest fields of investigation in which the field of Hydraulic Engineering has wide experience is that of Ecohydraulics. To awareness in todays society of the need to preserve the natural environment calls for the combined application of the knowledge of Hydraulic Engineering and Ecology, and this combined knowledge gives rise to Ecohydraulics.

The research into ecohydraulics within our field spans many areas such as the design of salmon passes, calculation of environmental water flow, inventory of impediments to the aquatic fauna and proposals for elimination, impacts on waterway and tide-dependent aquatic environments, study of the destruction of fish-spawn or mollusc etc.

The work undertaken in the design of free-pass mechanisms is especially important in this field. The objective of the hydraulic designs is to alleviate the negative impact of transversal obstacles (dams and reservoirs) on the aquatic fauna. Therefore, as part of the applied research, experiments on a reduced scale have been carried out on vertical fishways and our own mathematical models have been applied to better their design. The construction of fishways has also been on behalf of the civil service on salmon rivers in the north of Galicia.