Environmental flows: a definitive guide

Abstract

It is no secret that rivers have become one of our most important and imperiled resources around the globe. Guidance on how to manage rivers is urgently needed. Thankfully, a new book written by Dr. Angela Arthington: “Environmental Flows: Saving Rivers in the Third Millenium” takes a detailed look at rivers and how we can understand, manage, and restore them. This book is a very broad and comprehensive overview, organized into a series of 22 relatively concise chapters, beginning with an overview of the value of rivers and their current state of imperilment. This chapter sets the stage for understanding the range and magnitude of the challenges we face in saving rivers. For the purposes of this review, I partitioned my discussion of the book into several sections comprising a series of chapters that I felt addressed major themes related to environmental flows. From the introductory chapter, Arthington proceeds in a series of chapters (2–4) to provide a basic introduction to how rivers function, including basic overviews of major physical processes that contribute to river flows and a review of the evolving series of concepts and models that shape our thinking about how these processes translate into ecosystem functioning. Throughout these chapters, and the book in general, Arthington is careful to return to the axes of space, place, and time in rivers, as these provide a proper frame of reference for understanding processes at play, and how different perspectives can emerge along these axes. As just described these issues may seem rather vague to the uninitiated reader, but in the book, Arthington does a good job of providing many examples so the reader is given a firm idea of what they mean and specifically how they are manifested in how we perceive environmental flows. In this section (up to chapter 4), and again throughout the book there are also numerous graphical and tabular summaries of major points extracted from the text narrative that serve as a quick references and to reinforce the reader’s ability to track the major concepts, principles, or findings. The first section of the book leads up to a theme or paradigm that resonates throughout the book: the natural flow regime and its relevance for environmental flows. In the final chapter in this section (chapter 4), Arthington is careful to explore how flows translate into a variety of functions in rivers, focusing on both ecological and evolutionary influences ranging from nutrient flux to instream biota and riparian zones. At this point, the reader now has a foundation of information that can be applied to developing useful objectives for considering environmental flows. From chapter 4, the book turns to consider how past and present human activities have altered rivers and Environ Biol Fish (2014) 97:223–224 DOI 10.1007/s10641-013-0134-6