A carregar...
Publicação
Importance of considering riparian vegetation requirements for the long-term efficiency of environmental flows in aquatic microhabitats
| Nome: | Descrição: | Tamanho: | Formato: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.17 MB | Adobe PDF |
Orientador(es)
Resumo(s)
Environmental flows remain biased toward the
traditional biological group of fish species. Consequently,
these flows ignore the inter-annual flow variability that rules
species with longer lifecycles and therefore disregard the
long-term perspective of the riverine ecosystem. We analyzed
the importance of considering riparian requirements
for the long-term efficiency of environmental flows. For
that analysis, we modeled the riparian vegetation development
for a decade facing different environmental flows
in two case studies. Next, we assessed the corresponding
fish habitat availability of three common fish species in
each of the resulting riparian landscape scenarios. Modeling
results demonstrated that the environmental flows disregarding
riparian vegetation requirements promoted riparian
degradation, particularly vegetation encroachment. Such circumstance
altered the hydraulic characteristics of the river
channel where flow depths and velocities underwent local
changes of up to 10 cm and 40 cm s1, respectively. Accordingly,
after a decade of this flow regime, the available habitat
area for the considered fish species experienced modifications
of up to 110% when compared to the natural habitat. In
turn, environmental flows regarding riparian vegetation requirements
were able to maintain riparian vegetation near
natural standards, thereby preserving the hydraulic characteristics
of the river channel and sustaining the fish habitat close
to the natural condition. As a result, fish habitat availability
never changed more than 17% from the natural habitat
Descrição
Palavras-chave
riparian vegetation aquatic microhabitats
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 21, 5763–5780, 2017
Editora
European Geosciences Union