Abstract
AbstractFreshwater ecosystems along river floodplains host among the greatest biodiversity on Earth and are known to respond to anthropic pressure. For water impounded systems, resilience to changes in the natural flow regime is believed to be bidirectional. Whether such resilience prevents the system from returning to pristine conditions after the flow regime changes reverse is as yet unclear, though widely documented. In this work, we show that temporal irreversibility of river floodplains to recover their status may be explained by the dynamics of riparian water‐tolerant plant roots. Our model is a quantitative tool that will benefit scientists and practitioners in predicting the impact of changing flow regimes on long‐term river floodplain dynamics.
Highlights
River impoundment is a water management practice used worldwide that primarily affects the river natural flow regime
We develop a comprehensive model that accounts for the evolution of plant uprooting by flow after impoundment, and describes the equilibrium states of the floodplain system at a point
Perona and Crouzy (2018) modelled plant uprooting by flow as a result of stochastic erosion dynamics requiring a time interval T to scour the bed to the critical depth leading to plant collapse
Summary
River impoundment is a water management practice used worldwide that primarily affects the river natural flow regime. We develop a comprehensive model that accounts for the evolution of plant uprooting by flow after impoundment, and describes the (stable) equilibrium states of the floodplain system at a point. Plant uprooting probability depends on: plant elevation with respect to riverbed elevation; the representative mean flow erosion event at the riverbed elevation; and the critical scour depth for the plant (Perona & Crouzy, 2018). Both latter quantities depend on the statistical properties of the river discharge (and water levels), which obviously differ between pre- and post-impoundment periods. Calvani et al (2019))
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