It serves a buffer for river flow into the ocean. It's really the engineer of its ecosystem.
#Designing rivers: Environmental flows for ecosystem services in rivers natural and novellast spring the Colorado river reached its delta for the first time in 16 years flowing into Pacific ocean at the Gulf of california after wetting 70 miles of long-dry channels through the Sonoran Desert.
The planned 8-week burst of water from Mexico's Morelos Dam on the Arizona-Mexico border was the culmination of years of diplomatic negotiations between the United states and Mexico and campaigning from scientists and conservation organizations.
Environmental flows for natural hybrid and novel riverine ecosystems in a changing worldthere are two primary ways to achieve environmental flows of water necessary to sustain river ecosystems write Mike Acreman
or reverse alterations to the natural flow of the river. For rivers like the Colorado already much altered and bearing heavy demands from many different user groups a designer approach is more practical than attempting to return the river closer to its natural pre-development state say the authors.
Designers work to create a functional ecosystem or support ecosystem services under current conditions rather than recreate a historical ecosystem.
and other life inhabiting the river its banks and its marshes. Managers must plan to turn on the taps
Rebirth of the Elwha Riverfor rivers with fewer economic and social demands restoration guided by historical records of the natural dynamics of the river can be an effective restoration strategy say Acreman and colleagues.
and get the maximum value from ecosystem services river systems need to fluctuate in natural rhythms of volume velocity
and timing (to put it very simplistically At the end of the twentieth century Washington state decided that the water of the Elwha River would be most valuable flowing freely through Olympic national park to the Pacific at the Strait of Juan de Fuca supporting salmon trout clams and tourism.
Habitat and eroded coastline are recovering at an astonishing pace only one year after the demolition of two dams freed the river as Noreen Parks reports for her news story Rebirth of the Elwha River in ESA Frontier
Rivers of the Anthropocene? Outside protected wilderness the Elwha's story may be more of an anomaly than a blueprint for future river restoration projects.
As nonnative species land development and climate change remodel river ecosystems it is no longer easy to define what is natural for river systems.
But heavily used regulated and altered rivers have ecological value. The future of freshwater biodiversity is linked inextricably to land
and water infrastructure management writes N Leroy Poff of Colorado State university in his guest editorial for ESA Frontiers in
whether rivers have changed so much that we need to rethink some of our conceptions about restoration.
and rivers and 50 per cent of its groundwater supplies are contaminated. Manufacturing--including food processing paper production
They will earn the migration route by following the ultralight from White river Marsh in Wisconsin to the Gulf Coast of Florida.
#Tree rings used to determine history of geological features, arroyosa new GSA Bulletin study uses tree rings to document arroyo evolution along the lower Rio Puerco and Chaco
By determining burial dates in tree rings from salt cedar and willow investigators were able to precisely date arroyo sedimentary beds 30 cm thick or greater.
and repeat surveys to reconstruct the history of these arroyos. Arroyos are oversized deep channels that have vertical
or steeply cut walls made up of silt clay or sand. Because of this makeup arroyo systems are inherently unstable shifting at the century to millennial scale between broad floodplains and incised high-walled channels in
which floods have a high stream power that causes more rapid erosion. Study authors Jonathan Friedman of the U s. Geological Survey and colleagues note that
Along both rivers erosion occurred until the 1930s in association with extremely high flows. Subsequent infilling was caused by vegetation growth channel narrowing increased sinuosity and vertical accumulation of sediments.
However the 55-km study area along the Rio Puerco demonstrated upstream progression of arroyo widening
and filling but not of arroyo incision channel narrowing or floodplain vegetation development. Friedman and colleagues conclude that the occurrence of upstream progression within large basins like the Rio Puerco makes precise synchrony across basins impossible.
Arroyo wall retreat is limited now mostly to locations where meanders impinge on the arroyo wall forming hairpin bends for
and long-term bedrock erosion it would take the arroyo 310 years to completely fill in. Story Source:
which at the end of the Cretaceous was a lowland floodplain crisscrossed by river channels. The collection consists of more than 10000 identified plant fossils
#Creation of the Vuoksi River preceded a significant cultural shiftthe creation of the Vuoksi River
This created the Vuoksi River and resulted in an approximately four-metre decrease in the water level of Lake Saimaa revealing thousands of square kilometres of new land in Eastern Finland.
which the creation of the Vuoksi River played in the simultaneous spread of the most significant culture in our prehistory.
After the emergence of the river the culture which used asbestos in its pottery disappeared
Ducks fly once again in great numbers up the Mississippi river and across the Chesapeake bay. California condors are rebounding from just 22 birds to more than 200 today.
and two Chinese colleagues propose that the domestic peaches enjoyed worldwide today can trace their ancestry back at least 7500 years ago to the lower Yangtze river Valley in Southern China not far from Shanghai.
None of the botanical literature suggested the Yangtze Valley although many people thought that it happened somewhere in China.
Radiocarbon dating of ancient peach stones (pits) discovered in the Lower Yangtze river Valley indicates that the peach seems to have been diverged from its wild ancestors as early as 7500 years ago.
Peach stones are represented well at archeological sites in the Yangtze valley so they compared the size
By comparing the size of the stones from each site they were able to discern peaches growing significantly larger over time in the Yangtze valley demonstrating that domestication was taking place The first peach stones in China most similar to modern
For more than 40 years the ecologist has studied wetlands along rivers and in the prairie pothole region that extends from Canada through the Dakotas to Iowa.
Most of the river or riparian wetlands along the Missouri river were lost when the reservoirs were established according to Johnson.
For his dissertation in the early 70s he studied the forests along the river. Two years ago he looked at
#Underwater grass comeback bodes well for Chesapeake Baythe Susquehanna Flats a large bed of underwater grasses near the mouth of the Susquehanna river virtually disappeared from the upper Chesapeake bay after Tropical Storm Agnes more than 40 years ago.
and waterfowl enthusiasts as prime wildlife habitat researchers believe that the underwater grass beds at the shallow Susquehanna Flats began to decline in the 1960s
The Susquehanna Flats SAV bed is gigantic--the largest in the Chesapeake with multiple species of grasses said Professor Michael Kemp.
It was clear that the extreme flood event following Tropical Storm Agnes triggered the historic demise of the grasses at Susquehanna Flats
(since 1958) water quality (since 1984) and even climate-related variables such as temperature and rivers discharge dating back to the late 1800s.
When major floodwaters flowed from the Susquehanna river in Fall 2011 a portion of the bed was lost.
These processes and patterns are not unique to Susquehanna Flats. Similar trends have been suggested for the Mid-atlantic Coastal Bays
A diminished river flow will only add to the burden of providing resources to the thirsty farms
Goulden and UC Merced's Roger C. Bales investigated the potential influence of a warming climate on evapotranspiration in the Kings River basin in California's Sierra nevada
percent with a corresponding 26 percent decrease in river flow. Further the relationships among evapotranspiration temperature and vegetation density were similar across a broader area of the Sierra nevada suggesting that the impact of climate change on evapotranspiration
Their discovery required an international team of scientists fieldwork in the California mountains and at Harvard university's Concord Field Station plus collaborations from Harvard labs on both sides of the Charles river.
Big fires today are not outside the range of historical variation in size said Jon Keeley an ecologist based in Three Rivers Cal. with the U s. Geological Survey's Western Ecological Research center and a Fellow of the Ecological Society.
Pesticides or heavy metals enter rivers or lakes and vegetation where they are ingested by fish and mammals and in turn are consumed by other animals and humans.
and his team found that it's most similar to a population of wild rice species found in one location along the Niger river in Mali.
and Karuk tribes in the Klamath River area of northernmost California began his career with an interest in fisheries
The convergence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers was historically one of the largest salmon bearing runs on the West Coast Lake said
#Changes in agriculture increase high river flow ratesjust as a leaky roof can make a house cooler
when it's sunny changes in land use can affect river flow in both rainy and dry times say two University of Iowa researchers.
While it may be obvious that changes in river water discharge across the U s. Midwest can be related to changes in rainfall
The potential benefits of understanding river flow are especially great in the central United states particularly Iowa where spring and summer floods have hit the area in 1993 2008 2013 and 2014 interrupted by the drought of 2012.
In order to study the effect of changes in agricultural practices on Midwest river discharge the researchers focused on Iowa's Raccoon River at Van Meter Iowa.
and corn harvested acreage in the Raccoon River watershed. In times of flood and in times of drought water flow rates were exacerbated by more or less agriculture respectively.
In all nine rivers and streams including the Mississippi and Missouri rivers were included in the study.
The rivers studied drain most of Iowa and parts of Minnesota Montana Nebraska North dakota South dakota and Wisconsin.
These states have the highest use of neonicotinoid insecticides in the Nation and the chemicals were found in all nine rivers and streams.
Of the three most often found chemicals clothianidin was the most commonly detected showing up in 75 percent of the sites and at the highest concentration.
which is similar to the spring flushing of herbicides that has been documented in Midwestern U s. rivers
The team also has been refining efforts for breeding over the past year with captive narrow-headed gartersnakes from the Black River an area affected by the 2011 Wallow Fire
In the United states the Environmental protection agency found stormwater runoff to be one of the top 10 causes of compromised environments in rivers streams lakes ponds reservoirs bays and estuaries.
and Thames Basin Heath it can be affected by development such as housing and as part of the planning process developers must now provide data on presence
Lyuba was found by reindeer herders in May 2007 on the banks of the Yuribei River on the Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia.
Khroma was found in October 2008 near the Khroma River in northernmost Yakutia in northeast Siberia.
and the two mammoths mother and daughter plunged into the river. A fall would account for the fractured spinal column revealed by Khroma's CT scan as well as the mud she inhaled.
The varieties Natchez Osage Fantasy Basham's Party Pink and Miami have proven highly resistant to bacterial leaf spot
and Rocky mountain spotted fever and mosquitoes can spread West Nile Virus. Insect repellents are used to avoid exposure to pests that can bite attach
As a consequence heat-related deaths could reach about 200000 the cost of river flood damages could exceed â0 billion and 8000 km2 of forest could burn in southern Europe.
agriculture river floods coasts tourism energy droughts forest fires transport infrastructure and human health. The report also includes a pilot study on habitat suitability of forest tree species. Connie Hedegaard European Commissioner for Climate Action said:
Expected biophysical impacts (such as agriculture yields river floods transport infrastructure losses) have been integrated into an economic model
The study simulated this for the impacts of river floods and results show that they could multiply tenfold.
And because of the country's climate and geography irrigation is now widespread burdening rivers and groundwater supplies.
They found that domestic corn trade leads to significant losses of irrigation water resources (such as rivers reservoirs and groundwater.
From the 1930's to the present generations of citizens and government leaders have worked to protect this special area through designations of wilderness wild and scenic rivers and protection of critical wildlife habitat.
town by the Euphrates river in Syria may be the first evidence that agricultural irrigation systems in the middle East contributed to disease burden according to new Correspondence published in The Lancet Infectious diseases.
This research shows it may have been spread by the introduction of crop irrigation in ancient Mesopotamia the region along the Tigris-Euphrates river system that covers parts of modern-day Iraq Iran Kuwait Syria
dynasty-toppling floodsfor thousands of years Mother Nature has taken the blame for tremendous human suffering caused by massive flooding along the Yellow River long known in China as the River of Sorrow and Scourge of the Sons of Han.
Now new research from Washington University in St louis links the river's increasingly deadly floods to a widespread pattern of human-caused environmental degradation
and related flood-mitigation efforts that began changing the river's natural flow nearly 3000 years ago.
and nowhere more keenly witnessed than in attempts to harness the Yellow River said T. R. Kidder Phd lead author of the study and an archaeologist at Washington University.
A catastrophic floodit also suggests that the Chinese government's long-running efforts to tame the Yellow River with levees dikes
By 2000 years ago people were controlling the Yellow River or at least thought they were controlling it and that's the problem.
and Archaeology relies on a sophisticated analysis of sedimentary soils deposited along the Yellow River over thousands of years.
It includes data from the team's ongoing excavations at the sites of two ancient communities in the lower Yellow River flood plain of China's Henan province.
and bank/levee systems along the lower reaches of the Yellow River about 2900-2700 years ago.
By the beginning of the first millennium A d. the levee system had been extended much farther up river lining the banks for several hundred miles he estimated.
building levees causes sediments to accumulate in the river bed raising the river higher and making it more vulnerable to flooding
The Yellow River has been engineered an river--entirely unnatural--for quite a long time. Help for understanding climate change's effectskidder an authority on river basin geoarchaeology has gathered data from the Yellow River excavation sites over the last five summers.
He also conducts similar geoarchaeology research along the Mississippi river at a Native american site called Poverty Point in Louisiana.
He argues that geoarchaeology--a relatively new science that combines aspects of geology and archaeology--offers the potential to make dramatic contributions to our understanding of how climate change
The Yellow River he argues had existed for eons as a relatively calm and stable waterway until large numbers of Chinese farmers began disturbing the fragile environment of the upper river's Loess Plateau.
Widespread erosion in the river's upper regions caused it to carry incredibly heavy loads of sediment downstream where deposits gradually raised the river bed above levees and surrounding fields.
Implications for modern river managementslowly over thousands of years human intervention began to have a dramatic impact on the river's character.
Periodic breaches of the levee system led to devastating floods with some shifting the river's main channel hundreds of miles from its initial course.
While the research offers new insight into Chinese history it also has interesting implications for modern river management policies around the globe such as those causing similar flooding problems along the Missouri
and Mississippi rivers in the United states. To think that we can avoid similar catastrophe today due to better technology is a dangerous notion he said.
Unlike ancient China where human mistakes devastated a single river valley we now have the technology to make mistakes that can cause devastation on a truly global scale.
or it might end up in a river or stream or in the ocean or it might end up in a reservoir.
Places at risk include urban areas in China where the disease has occurred not yet along with large swaths of the Bengal regions of Bangladesh and India the Mekong and Red river deltas in Vietnam and isolated parts of Indonesia and the Philippines.
and West Nile virus. One approach to controlling mosquitoes is to apply pesticides by spraying from planes or trucks over a large area.
Because forests clean rivers climate regulation and other ecosystem services are freely available to everyone landowners often receive nothing for actions they take on their own land that contribute to the pool of ecosystem services.
The maps show that the greatest benefits occur in the eastern U s. particularly in states in and around the Ohio river Valley as well as the Rocky mountain region.
and shelter are deprived of that habitat. â#oethis can have cascading effects through the food chainâ#said Bill Overholt an entomology professor at UFÂ##s Indian River Research and Education Center in Fort
#Hydrologists find Mississippi river networks buffering system for nitrates is overwhelmeda new method of measuring the interaction of surface water
and groundwater along the length of the Mississippi river network adds fresh evidence that the network's natural ability to chemically filter out nitrates is being overwhelmed.
in the Mississippi river network goes through a natural filtering process as it flows to the Gulf of mexico.
The analysis found that 99.6 percent of the water in the network passes through filtering sediment along the banks of creeks streams and rivers.
but the unfortunate implication is that the river's natural filtration systems for nitrates appear to be operating at or very close to full capacity.
While further research is needed this would make it unlikely that natural systems can accommodate the high levels of nitrates that have made their way from farmland and other sources into the river network's waterways.
As a result of its filtration systems being overwhelmed the river system operates less as a buffer and more as a conveyor belt transporting nitrates to the Gulf of mexico.
and Brian Kiel a Ph d. candidate in geology at the university's Jackson School of Geosciences provides valuable information to those who manage water quality efforts including the tracking of nitrogen fertilizers used to grow crops in the Midwest in the Mississippi river
This is the first work putting together a physics-based estimate on the scale of one of these big rivers looking at the net effect of nitrate removal in big river systems.
The Mississippi river network includes the Ohio river watershed on the east and the Missouri river watershed in the west as well as the Mississippi watershed in the middle.
Using detailed ground-level data from the United states Geological Survey (USGS) and Environmental protection agency Cardenas and Kiel analyzed the waterways for sinuosity (how much they bend and curve);
One compound nitrate is a major component of inorganic fertilizers that has helped make the area encompassed by the Mississippi river network the biggest producer of corn soybeans wheat cattle
While the biggest source of nitrates in the Mississippi river network are industrial fertilizers nitrates also come from animal manure urban areas wastewater treatment
The residence times when water entered the hyporheic zones ranged from less than an hour in the river system's headwaters to more than a month in larger meandering channels.
Cardenas said the research provides a large-scale holistic view of the river network's natural buffering mechanism
The new model he added can be a first step to enable a wider analysis of the river system.
When a river system gets totally overwhelmed You lose the chemical functions the chemical buffering said Cardenas.
which are divided by the Yangtze river--the largest river in China flowing west to east across the vast country.
He soon found that the Yangtze was an important cultural divider in China. I found out that the Yangtze river helped divide dialects in China and
I soon learned that the Yangtze also roughly divides rice farming and wheat farming he said.
He dug into anthropologists'accounts of pre-modern rice and wheat villages and realized that they might account for the different mindsets carried forward from an agrarian past into modernity.
Talhelm said that one of the most striking findings was that counties on the north-south border--just across the Yangtze river from each other--exhibited the same north/south psychological characteristics as areas much more distantly separated north and south.
In a separate study presented on April 27 at the Experimental Biology annual meeting in San diego Laurie Nommsen-Rivers Phd a researcher at the Cincinnati Children's Perinatal Institute showed that postpartum metabolic health
Dr. Nommsen-Rivers is senior author of both of these new studies. The single most important factor in building a strong milk supply is frequent and thorough breastfeeding beginning at birth she says.
Dr. Nommsen-Rivers and Dr. Riddle are planning to conduct a clinical trial of metformin a drug used to control blood sugar in type 2 diabetes.
and dead trees in the Weber River basin the researchers built a tree-ring chronology that extends back 585 years into Utah's natural history.
He remembered a 2012 report of a solitary bee sipping the tears of a yellow-spotted river turtle in Ecuador's Yasunã National park
and Tribulations story about the Ecuadorian bee and the river turtle by Olivier Dangles and JÃ rã'me Casas in ESA's Frontiers.
and Platte rivers says hydrologist Reed Maxwell of the Colorado School Of mines. Maxwell and colleagues have published results of their study of beetle effects on stream flows in this week's issue of the journal Nature Climate Change.
The regime that used fewer chemicals resulted in more than 50 percent reductions in the amount of nitrogen that escaped into groundwater and rivers with crop yields close to those of standard management.
and The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Bedfordshire UK via the Across the River Project together with experienced rangers from the Forestry Development Authority in Liberia local research assistants from Liberia and Sierra leone
which we sometimes had to cross rivers climb mountains and pass through steep valleys. But the effort paid off.
Research by Alison Macintosh a Phd candidate in Cambridge university's Department of Archaeology and Anthropology shows that after the emergence of agriculture in Central europe from around 5300 BC the bones of those living in the fertile soils of the Danube river valley
#A balanced carbon footprint for the Amazon Riverconsidered until now a source of greenhouse gas emissions capturing the CO2 fixed by the tropical forest through the soils of the watershed to release it into the atmosphere the Amazon river actually has balanced a carbon footprint.
In fact a new study shows that the CO2 outgassed by the river is drawn only from the river system itself by the semiaquatic vegetation on the flood plains.
Therefore the Amazon recycles the CO2 from its own river system and not that fixed by the tropical forest releasing as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it absorbs.
Until now researchers thought that rivers were supplied with carbon by trees and other land plants through the soils of the watershed.
Now researchers have shown just that the CO2 outgassed by the waters of the Amazon is drawn in reality only from the river system itself.
Conversely to what we thought the river thus acts as a CO2 pump. The link between aquatic vegetation and CO2EMISSIONTEN French and Brazilian teams within the framework of the ANR-CARBAMA project
half of this carbon in the form of dissolved CO2 and biodegradable organic matter is transferred directly to the river.
Therefore the carbon footprint of the river system in the central Amazon region is close to equilibrium:
and it's not very good at dispersing seeds long distance said author Robert Arkle a supervisory ecologist for the USGS Forest & Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center at the Snake river Field Station in Idaho.
Methane fuels life in pristine chalk riversscientists from Queen Mary University of London have found that naturally high concentrations of the greenhouse gas methane contributes to energy production in chalk rivers in a new study
published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Chalk rivers found from Dorset to Cambridgeshire sustain a diverse range of protected animals
and plants and are renowned globally for fly fishing an industry worth more than £4m on the Rivers Test and Itchen (Hampshire) alone.
The researchers analysed the methane concentration in over 30 rivers in Southern England including the River Lambourn in Berkshire.
The rapid growth of aquatic plants during the summer months prevents light from reaching the river bed
For example fine sediments washed into rivers from farmland used to grow crops are known to be sources of methane gas.
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