The Regime Prescription Tool (HEC-RPT) is designed to help groups of scientists, engineers, and water managers access hydrologic data and draft flow recommendations while they formulate different ways to manage rivers.
HEC-RPT is the first joint software development by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Development costs (through the first release version) were shared between the Hydrologic Engineering Center of the Corps, the Portland District of the Corps, and The Nature Conservancy. Development was undertaken in support of the Sustainable Rivers Program, which is an ongoing nation-wide partnership between the Corps and The Nature Conservancy to improve the health and life of rivers by changing the operations of Corps water resources infrastructure.
This manual introduces HEC-RPT and details its functionality and supporting resources such as its demonstration project. There are also several publications that include information related to HEC-RPT applications. Hickey et al. (2015) provides an overview of software and highlights commonalities between HEC-RPT and other collaborative decision support tools. Esselman and Opperman (2010) describes use of HEC-RPT to help define environmental flows below a proposed hydroelectric dam for Patuca River in Honduras. Methods and results of HEC-RPT applications for environmental flows are detailed in reports for the Yangtze River in China (CTGPC and TNC 2009) and the Willamette (Gregory et al. 2007), McKenzie (Risley et al. 2010), Santiam (Bach et al. 2013), Des Moines (Blann 2016), Cape Fear (DeMeester et al. 2019), Kansas (TNC and USACE 2021), Iowa (USACE and TNC 2023), Cossatot (Hart et al. 2023), and Pecos (USACE 2023) rivers in the United States. HEC-RPT was also used to formulate pool management alternatives for reservoirs in the Kansas River basin (TNC and USACE 2023).