Ecological Thresholds and Resilience in Streams

Hilderbrand, Robert H.; Utz, Ryan M.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-17719-9_18

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…Understanding the implications of increasing geographic extent and intensity of human land practices for biodiversity remains critical to inform management and policy efforts (Barnosky et al., 2012; Hilderbrand & Utz, 2015). By leveraging data from thousands of streams and rivers in Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania, our study provides the first evidence for threshold responses of fish communities across diverse gradients of land use modification.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Threshold responses of riverine fish communities to land use conversion across regions of the world

Chen

Olden

2020

Global Change Biology

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The growing human enterprise has sparked greater interest in identifying ecological thresholds in land use conversion beyond which populations or communities demonstrate abrupt nonlinear or substantive change in species composition. Such knowledge remains fundamental to understanding ecosystem resilience to environmental degradation and informing land use planning into the future. Confronting this challenge has been largely limited to inferring thresholds in univariate metrics of species richness and indices of biotic integrity and has largely ignored how land use legacies of the past may shape community responses of today. By leveraging data for 13,069 riverine sites from temperate, subtropical, and boreal climate zones on four continents, we characterize patterns of community change along diverse gradients of urbanization and agricultural land use, and identity threshold values beyond which significant alterations in species composition exists. Our results demonstrate the apparent universality by which freshwater fish communities are sensitive to even low levels of watershed urbanization (range of threshold values: 1%-12%), but consistently higher (and more variable) levels of agricultural development (2%-37%). We demonstrated that fish community compositional thresholds occurred, in general, at lower levels of watershed urbanization and agriculture when compared to threshold responses in species richness. This supports the notion that aggregated taxon-specific responses may better reflect the complexity of assemblage responses to land use development. We further revealed that the ghost of land use past plays an important role in moderating how current-day fish communities respond to land use intensification. Subbasins of the United States experiencing greater rates of past land use change demonstrated higher current-day thresholds. Threshold responses of community composition, such as those identified in our study, illustrate the need for globally coordinated efforts to prioritize country-specific management and policy initiatives that ensure that freshwater fish diversity is not inevitably lost in the future.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Threshold responses of riverine fish communities to land use conversion across regions of the world

Chen

Olden

2020

Global Change Biology

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“…A sponge city is essentially composed of a series of sponge facilities (or functional units), which can be roughly divided into two groups similar to green or grey facilities (or functional units) in theory, and then the ecosponge resilience should be divided into the "eco-derived" and "spongelike" ones, respectively. The former illustrates an ecosystem's ability to absorb disturbance and recover its functions and structures after a disturbance, defined as "eco-resilience" (Hilderbrand & Utz, 2015). The latter refers to water absorption and release performance deriving from urban constructed infrastructure under a certain water pressure environmental condition, that is defined as "sponge-resilience" in this study.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eco-Sponge Elasticity and its Indices Developed to Assess the Performance of Infrastructure in Sponge Cities:

Zhu

2019

IRSPSD International

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In recent years techniques for assessing the "sponge city" concept in practice have been developed and diversified at a rapid pace, therefore a unified assessment framework based on sponge techniques is becoming more and more important for comparing and analysing the performance of different techniques across different sponge city projects. However, previous work has mainly focused on enhancing or developing a certain single sponge technique. This research tries to establish a framework through integrating the resilience of the natural ecosystem with that of engineered infrastructure of sponge cities, forming a new concept of 'Eco-sponge resilience', and quantifying 'Ecosponge Elasticity'. In particular, a set of elasticities with a unified dimension are developed. The eco-sponge elasticity mainly consists of five types of sponge elasticity and two types of ecological elasticity, including factors such as infiltration, storage, detention, transportation and decontamination, ecological vegetation and natural ecological water elasticities, with which the value of eco-sponge elasticity of a sponge city project can be easily estimated. This research also considers a case study to interpret how to assess the ecosponge elasticities of six pilot sites of sponge city projects in Xiamen. The result shows that the presented evaluation method is feasible and helpful for assessing and enhancing the performance of sponge cities considering four aspects: the water environment, water resources, water security and water ecosystem of the urban system.

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“…Barnosky et al 2017). Hilderbrand and Utz (2015) go even further and claim that the perceived ability to restore a system back to its predisturbance state is usually naïve because of the high multidimensionality of most ecological relationships. It is even claimed that there is little evidence of successfully restoring stream ecosystems back to an undisturbed state in spite of the vast amount of money spent on restoration projects (Bernhardt and Palmer, 2011;Palmer et al 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How vegetation can aid in coping with river management challenges: A brief review

Rowiński

Västilä

Aberle

et al. 2018

Ecohydrology & Hydrobiology

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New sustainable, cost-effective solutions are urgently needed for river management since conventional practices have posed serious ecological threats on streams, rivers and the surrounding riparian areas. Besides addressing the societal needs e.g. for flood management, river management should increasingly address the ecosystem requirements for improved water quality and biodiversity. We argue that it is not feasible to solve existing and future river management challenges with intensive restoration projects. Instead, we believe that less resource-intensive solutions using natural channel processes and features, including vegetation, should be investigated. Besides directly supporting biota, aquatic and riparian vegetation traps, takes up and helps to process nutrients and harmful substances, and thus this paper emphasizes vegetation as a tool for nature-based solutions (NBS) in river management. In this paper, emphasis is placed on the usage of vegetation as a NBS in river management. We synthesize findings from key literature, showing that the fate of substances in channel systems is largely controlled by abiotic and biotic processes facilitated and modified by vegetation, including flow hydrodynamics, channel morphology, and sediment transport. Subsequently, we demonstrate how vegetation can be incorporated into channel designs, focusing on a two-stage (compound) design to improve resilience to flooding, control the transport of substances, and enhance the ecological status. As a conclusion, clever use and maintenance of vegetation present unused potential to obtain large-scale positive environmental impacts in rivers and streams experiencing anthropogenic pressures.

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Ecological Thresholds and Resilience in Streams

Cited by 9 publications

References 83 publications

Threshold responses of riverine fish communities to land use conversion across regions of the world

Threshold responses of riverine fish communities to land use conversion across regions of the world

Eco-Sponge Elasticity and its Indices Developed to Assess the Performance of Infrastructure in Sponge Cities:

How vegetation can aid in coping with river management challenges: A brief review

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