The role of human interference on the channel shifting of the Karkheh River in the Lower Khuzestan plain (Mesopotamia, SW Iran)

‘Friendship is a slow ripening fruit’: an agency perspective on water, values and infrastructure

“…Both water courses flowed higher than the landscape on levees, but exactly which one was natural and which not remains to be studied (see Jotheri, Allen and Wilkinson 2016). However, we would expect patterns like the Khuzestan levee irrigation areas in ancient Iran, in which short canals flow down slope of longer levees to irrigate fields (Wilkinson et al 2012;see Heyvaert and Baeteman 2008;Heyvaert et al 2012).…”

The rivers of civilization

“…channel avulsion or channels drying up). Avulsions occur in several situations: on fans, where radial streams periodically relocate laterally; along braided or meandering floodplain channels; on large-scale and low gradient megafans; and in deltaic environments where individual channels may silt up (T€ ornqvist and Bridge, 2002;Slingerland and Smith, 2004;Morozova, 2005;Heyvaert et al, 2011). These may be triggered by exceptional floods overtopping levees but also by quite moderate events as well; this may require a long 'preparatory' period of local channel aggradation, and it is only after this that channel shifts occurs.…”

“…In some circumstances there were strong directional gradients within flooding alluvial environments (as radially on fans, or down the backslope of wider levees), but in others water distribution systems radiated from artificially-engineered dispersion points with much less topographical constraint (e.g. Heyvaert et al, 2011) Whilst emphasis is often rightly placed on the sophistication of early engineering, this also followed a kind of 'design with nature' approach, as in the exploitation of secondary channels, crevass splays and floodouts which were already in place. But these subenvironments were also variably sensitive to floods and droughts, to channel shifts, and to salinity, health and sedimentation problems arising from high rates of evaporation in stilled waters.…”

Humans as the third evolutionary stage of biosphere engineering of rivers

“…cit., and references therein) also noted a global-scale chemical and biogeochemical modification of terrestrial water bodies. He traced the origins of the human modification of river systems to the third millennium BC, beginning in major rivers associated with the earliest civilizations of the Euphrates (e.g., see Besançon and Geyer, 1996) and Tigris river systems in Mesopotamia (e.g., see Heyvaert et al, 2012), the Nile in Egypt, the Indus in Pakistan, and the Huang He in China. In medium-sized rivers of Western Europe Meybeck (op.…”