What wetlands can teach us: reconstructing historical water-management systems and their present-day importance through GIScience

Lanen, Rowin J. van; Kosian, Menne

doi:10.1007/s12685-020-00251-7

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…As the historical maps can only be contextualized through other written sources and can therefore only be interpreted in the first place, the integration of environmental history research into restoration processes is indispensable. As GIS-based research in this field has been fruitful [39,41,95], future projects on the River Inn could benefit from a combination of the analysis of historical river maps with GIS-based research.…”

Section: Conclusion Or: the Long-term Transformation Of The River Innmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Environmental History of the First Attempts to Straighten the River Inn in Tyrol (1745–1792)

Nießner

2024

Water

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The first systematic attempts to straighten the River Inn in Tyrol for shipping and land reclamation date back to the middle of the 18th century. A dedicated hydraulic engineering authority—the so-called Main Ark Inspection—was established to realize this challenging task. The one-man authority was unable to straighten the Alpine river through the period of its existence up to 1792. The reasons for this were by no means related to a lack of technical resources and knowledge. On the contrary, a micro- and environmental-historical analysis of the attempts to straighten the River Inn highlights the complexity of the causes, which were mutually reinforcing and multifactorial. In this paper, four key causes are examined in more detail: (1) the social organization of water engineering, (2) social conflicts between riparian communities among themselves and with the hydraulic engineering authority, (3) conflicts between Tyrol and Bavaria at the wet border downstream of Kufstein, and (4) increased bedload discharge into the main river by tributaries. To illustrate the causes mentioned above, historical river maps are analyzed in great detail, drawing on contemporaneous written sources. The approach thereby highlights the overall complexity of pre-modern hydraulic engineering in all its facets, be they social, technical, natural, administrative, or organizational. To conclude, the results of this environmental history research are embedded and discussed in the context of integrated river management in the Anthropocene.

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Section: Conclusion Or: the Long-term Transformation Of The River Innmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Environmental History of the First Attempts to Straighten the River Inn in Tyrol (1745–1792)

Nießner

2024

Water

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“…Final closure of the sea entrance took place as the progressive reduction of the fluvial discharge and tidal prism enabled coastal long‐shore sand transport and dune formation to finally close the outlet (Van der Valk, 1995; De Haas et al ., 2019). The remaining Old Rhine channel and some of the open crevasse channels formed important natural waterways during and after the Medieval reclamation of these vast peatlands (Van Lanen & Kosian, 2020; Abrahamse et al ., 2021). Many of these old waterways still function in the current landscape, and their channel belts and levées appear as ridges in the landscape.…”

Section: Synthesis: Phases Of Infillingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vegetation and peat accumulation steer Holocene tidal–fluvial basin filling and overbank sedimentation along the Old Rhine River, The Netherlands

et al. 2022

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In the transformation from tidal systems to freshwater coastal landscapes, plants act as eco-engineering species that reduce hydrodynamics and trap sediment, but nature and timing of the mechanisms of land creation along estuaries remains unclear. This article focuses on the Old Rhine estuary (The Netherlands) to show the importance of vegetation in coastal landscape evolution, predominantly regarding tidal basin filling and overbank morphology. This estuary hosted the main outflow channel of the river Rhine between ca 6500 to 2000 cal BP, and was constrained by peat during most of its existence. This study reconstructs its geological evolution, by correlating newly integrated geological data and new field records to varying conditions. Numerical modelling was performed to test the inferred mechanisms. It was found that floodbasin vegetation and resulting organic accumulation strongly accelerated back-barrier infill, by minimizing tidal influence. After tidal and wave transport had already sufficiently filled the back-barrier basin, reed rapidly expanded from its edges under brackish conditions, as shown by diatom analysis and datings. Reed growth provided a positive infilling feedback by reducing tidal flow and tidal prism, accelerating basin infilling. New radiocarbon dates show that large-scale crevassing along the Old Rhine River driven by tidal backwater effectonly started as nutrient-rich river water transformed the floodbasin into an Alder carr in a next phase of estuary evolution. Such less dense vegetation promotes crevassing as sediments are more easily transported into the floodbasin. As river discharge increased and estuary mouth infilling progressed, crevasse activity diminished around 3800 to 3000 cal BP, likely due to a reduced tidal backwater effect. The insights from this data-rich Holocene study showcase the dominant role that

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“…Digital humanities, remote-sensing and manifold database tools offer fundamentally new approaches to integrative floodplain research [47,57,63,[228][229][230]. They enable the systematic integration of heterogeneous cultural and natural data such as texts, maps, place names, archaeological finds and geoscientific data [221,[231][232][233], and allow for analyses of different spatial and chronological scales, from events to the longue durée [51,[234][235][236][237][238].…”

Section: Advances In Multidisciplinary Big Data Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Way to the Fluvial Anthroposphere—Current Limitations and Perspectives of Multidisciplinary Research

Werther¹,

Mehler

Schenk

et al. 2021

Water

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Floodplains represent a global hotspot of sensitive socioenvironmental changes and early human forcing mechanisms. In this review, we focus on the environmental conditions of preindustrial floodplains in Central Europe and the fluvial societies that operated there. Due to their high land-use capacity and the simultaneous necessity of land reclamation and risk minimisation, societies have radically restructured the Central European floodplains. According to the current scientific consensus, up to 95% of Central European floodplains have been extensively restructured or destroyed. Therefore, question arises as to whether or when it is justified to understand Central European floodplains as a ‘Fluvial Anthroposphere’. The case studies available to date show that human-induced impacts on floodplain morphologies and environments and the formation of specific fluvial societies reveal fundamental changes in the medieval and preindustrial modern periods. We aim to contribute to disentangling the questions of when and why humans became a significant controlling factor in Central European floodplain formation, and how humans in interaction with natural processes and other chains of effects have modified floodplains. As a conclusion, we superimpose emerging fields of research concerning the onset of the Fluvial Anthroposphere and provide 10 specific thematic objectives for future multidisciplinary work.

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What wetlands can teach us: reconstructing historical water-management systems and their present-day importance through GIScience

Cited by 8 publications

References 19 publications

An Environmental History of the First Attempts to Straighten the River Inn in Tyrol (1745–1792)

An Environmental History of the First Attempts to Straighten the River Inn in Tyrol (1745–1792)

Vegetation and peat accumulation steer Holocene tidal–fluvial basin filling and overbank sedimentation along the Old Rhine River, The Netherlands

On the Way to the Fluvial Anthroposphere—Current Limitations and Perspectives of Multidisciplinary Research

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