Riparian responses to extreme climate and land-use change scenarios

Fernandes, María Rosário; Segurado, Pedro; Jauch, Eduardo; Ferreira, Maria Teresa

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.06.099

Cited by 38 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…There is evidence that riparian vegetation expands laterally both to and from the active channel, even during extremely low flows downstream of dams. Several studies recognized that these successional trajectories of riparian vegetation were an effect of land use and fluvial disturbance (Aguiar et al., ; Fernandes, Segurado, Jauch, & Ferreira, ). Therefore, the implementation of basin management plans should be guided by integrated sustainable policies and river conservation practices, based on an understanding of the specificities of the ecological responses of riparian guilds to flow components and land uses.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The abundance and distribution of guilds of riparian woody plants change in response to land use and flow regulation

Aguiar

Segurado

Martins

et al. 2018

Journal of Applied Ecology

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Many riparian ecosystems in Mediterranean Europe are affected by land use and flow alteration by dams. We focused on understanding how these stressors and their components affect riparian forests in the region. We asked the following questions: (1) Are there well‐defined, responsive riparian guilds? (2) Do dam‐induced streamflows determine abundance and distribution of riparian guilds? (3) What are the main drivers governing composition and cover of riparian guilds in regulated rivers? We inventoried the cover of riparian woody species in free‐flowing rivers and downstream of dams. We performed a cluster analysis and ordination to derive riparian guilds, using abundance data from 66 riparian woody species and 26 functional plant traits. We used a reduced set of principal components for the environment, land use and hydrology, and general linear modelling to explore the effect of these factors (separately and combined) on riparian guilds. We found that: (1) four dominant guilds are responsive to disturbance in southwestern European streams, namely the obligate riparian, water‐stress tolerant, deciduous competitive and Mediterranean evergreen guilds; (2) a set of land use and hydrological variables differentially affect the diverse co‐occurring riparian guilds; (3) frequency and duration of high flow pulses and the low‐flow conditions were major drivers of change in landscapes dominated by intensive agriculture and forestry; (4) storage reservoirs reduced the cover of obligate riparian and Mediterranean evergreen guilds, and increased the abundance of water‐stress tolerant and deciduous competitive guilds, while run‐of‐river dams, having limited water storage, reduced both obligate and deciduous competitive guilds. Synthesis and applications. Future research in southwestern Europe should address the resilience of riparian guilds and the effects of interacting landscape factors and stressors on guild distribution. Streamflow regulations downstream of reservoirs should focus on specific flow components, namely the magnitude of flows, and frequency and duration of extreme flow events. For successful mitigation of the dam‐induced effects on riparian vegetation, river management plans must incorporate the environmental and land use site‐specific contexts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The abundance and distribution of guilds of riparian woody plants change in response to land use and flow regulation

Aguiar

Segurado

Martins

et al. 2018

Journal of Applied Ecology

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“…Trajectories of change, in general, is highly associated with demographic phenomena and long-term induced processes on either agriculture and soil [23], landscape [24,25], vegetation [26], ecosystem and energy [27], watersheds [28] or governance-economic policies [29]. Besides human beings, natural forces such as climate [30], and environmental hazards [31] are also at the central force of the trajectories of change concept. The trajectories of LULC change in this work referred to replacement of LULC classes by another for a given sampling unit over many years.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Nigeria losing its natural vegetation and landscape? Assessing the landuse-landcover change trajectories and effects in Onitsha using remote sensing and GIS

Nwaogu

Okeke²,

Fadipe

et al. 2017

Open Geosciences

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Onitsha is one of the largest commercial cities in Africa with its population growth rate increasing arithmetically for the past two decades. This situation has direct and indirect effects on the natural resources including vegetation and water. The study aimed at assessing land use-land cover (LULC) change and its effects on the vegetation and landscape from 1987 to 2015 using geoinformatics. Supervised and unsupervised classifications including maximum likelihood algorithm were performed using ENVI 4.7 and ArcGIS 10.1 versions. The LULC was classified into 7 classes: built-up areas (settlement), waterbody, thick vegetation, light vegetation, riparian vegetation, sand deposit (bare soil) and floodplain. The result revealed that all the three vegetation types decreased in areas throughout the study period while, settlement, sand deposit and floodplain areas have remarkable increase of about 100% in 2015 when compared with the total in 1987. Number of dominant plant species decreased continuously during the study. The overall classification accuracies in 1987, 2002 and 2015 was 90.7%, 92.9% and 95.5% respectively. The overall kappa coefficient of the image classification for 1987, 2002 and 2015 was 0.98, 0.93 and 0.96 respectively. In general, the average classification was above 90%, a proof that the classification was reliable and acceptable.

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“…This software eases analyses required for the implementation of frameworks such as the European Water Framework Directive (European Commission 2000). In fact, looking at numerous publications it is possible to recognise the broad-ranging possible applicability of the River Network Toolkit (Pont et al (2005), Clapcott et al (2012), Markovic et al (2012), Trautwein et al (2012), Filipe et al (2013), Clavero and Hermoso (2015), Kuemmerlen et al (2015) and Fernandes et al (2016)). This software solves the problem of dealing with large datasets and acts as a bridge that connects topological, environmental and landscape variables, allowing further information to be calculated with the program.…”

Section: Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The River Network Toolkit – RivTool

Duarte

Segurado

Oliveira³

et al. 2018

Ecography

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Freshwater ecosystems are some of the most endangered environments in the world, being affected at multiple scales by the surrounding landscape and human activities therein. Effective research, conservation and management of these ecosystems requires integrating environmental and landscape data with hierarchic river networks by means of summarisation and synthesis of information for large and comprehensive areas at different scales (e.g. basin, sub-basin, upstream drainage area). The dendritic nature of river networks, the need to tackle multiple scales and the ever-growing sources of digital information (e.g. temperature or land use data grids) have increasingly led to hardly manageable processing time and stringent hardware requirements when integrating and working with this information. Here we present the River Network Toolkit (RivTool), a software that uses only tabular data to derive and calculate new information at multiple scales for riverine landscapes. It uses data from linear hierarchical river networks and the environmental/landscape data from their respective drainage areas. The software allows the acquisition of: 1) information that characterises river networks based on its topographic nature; 2) data obtained via mathematical calculations that account for the hierarchical and network nature of these systems; and 3) output information using different spatial data sources (e.g. climatic, land use, topologic) that result from up and downstream summarisations. This user-friendly software considers two units of analysis (segment and sub-basin) and is time effective even with large datasets. RivTool facilitates and reduces the time required for extracting information for freshwater ecosystems, and may thus contribute to increase scientific productivity, efficiency and accurateness when generating new or improving existing knowledge on large-scale patterns and processes in river networks. BackgroundFreshwater supports almost 6% of all known species though covering only 0.8% of the earth's surface and representing 0.01% of the world's water (Dudgeon et al. 2006). These ecosystems are amongst the most endangered environments worldwide (Ricciardi and Rasmussen 1999, Dudgeon et al. 2006). River systems are linked to their adjacent

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Riparian responses to extreme climate and land-use change scenarios

Cited by 38 publications

References 73 publications

The abundance and distribution of guilds of riparian woody plants change in response to land use and flow regulation

The abundance and distribution of guilds of riparian woody plants change in response to land use and flow regulation

Is Nigeria losing its natural vegetation and landscape? Assessing the landuse-landcover change trajectories and effects in Onitsha using remote sensing and GIS

The River Network Toolkit – RivTool

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