Morphological and ecological responses to 'assisted recovery' river restoration projects in Scotland.
Abstract
There is increasing acknowledgement that river restoration should aim to restore natural physical processes rather than 're-engineering' a largely fixed channel/ floodplain environment. The process-based `assisted recovery' approach removes/ reduces artificial constraints to natural geomorphic process (e.g. bank protection, flood embankments, sediment supply deficit), allowing for the evolution to a more sustainable and diverse physical environment than is possible with `traditional' intrusive engineering approaches. However, there are few projects associated with post-implementation monitoring sufficient to develop an understanding of how different river environments respond to specific restoration programmes. Furthermore, although it is often implicitly assumed that biological communities will respond positively to the reinstatement of natural physical function in rivers, little data exists to objectively support this. We present case studies from two restoration projects associated with extensive long-term monitoring (physical and biological), both examples of the process-based approach but with differing degrees of assisted recovery.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMEP043..07M
- Keywords:
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- 1803 Anthropogenic effects;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1820 Floodplain dynamics;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1825 Geomorphology: fluvial;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1879 Watershed;
- HYDROLOGY