It is of great significance for the watershed management department to reasonably allocate water resources and ensure the sustainable development of river ecosystems. The greatly important issue is to accurately calculate instream ecological flow. In order to precisely compute instream ecological flow, flow variation is taken into account in this study. Moreover, the heuristic segmentation algorithm that is suitable to detect the mutation points of flow series is employed to identify the change

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... points. Besides, based on the law of tolerance and ecological adaptation theory, the maximum instream ecological flow is calculated, which is the highest frequency of the monthly flow based on the GEV distribution and very suitable for healthy development of the river ecosystems. Furthermore, in order to guarantee the sustainable development of river ecosystems under some bad circumstances, minimum instream ecological flow is calculated by a modified Tennant method which is improved by replacing the average flow with the highest frequency of flow. Since the modified Tennant method is more suitable to reflect the law of flow, it has physical significance, and the calculation results are more reasonable.