It is interesting to see from Fig. 6 that there is a trend in the dataset of the small-scale plants that the land occupation per unit of electricity produced is reduced with the volume of electricity produced. The decreased land occupation per volume of electricity produced in the small hydropower plants in our project might imply a general trend that larger small-scale projects (below 10 MW) have a smaller land occupation per unit electricity than the smallest. One explanation can be that larger projects have more resources for technical and environmental competence available. However, this trend does not continue as the large hydropower projects have a much higher land occupation (36–62 m2/MWh) than the largest small-scale plants (in the range of 5 m2/MWh). Similar results on the decrease of impact with increased power production (among the small-scale plants) can also be found for the visibility parameter (Aase, 2013).