Abstract Details
5/22/2018 |
16:00 - 17:00
| Grand Riverview Ballroom B
Keynote: Dr. Ellen Wohl
RIVER CORRIDOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
A river corridor includes the active channel(s), floodplain, and underlying hyporheic zone. Conceptualizing rivers as corridors emphasizes interactions among physical process and form and biotic communities, and among components of channel, floodplain, and hyporheic zone. A river corridor is created and maintained by fluxes that occur in a physical context. The physical context governs adjustment and results in a particular level of spatial heterogeneity, connectivity, resiliency, and ecological integrity. Recent research on North St. Vrain Creek, Colorado is used to illustrate how the framework of river corridor science facilitates understanding of differences in biomass among individual river segments. Ongoing research on how river process and form influence the partitioning of terrestrially derived organic carbon among gaseous emissions, storage in riverine sediment, and transport to the oceans is used to illustrate the implications of river corridor science at the global scale. Development of integrated numerical models that account for threshold behavior is important to improving the predictive ability of river corridor science. Conceptualizing rivers as corridors – or ecosystems – also facilitates understanding of human alterations of rivers through time and can be used to promote restoration of river fluxes and processes.
Ellen Wohl (Primary Presenter), Dept. of Geosciences, Colorado State University, Ellen.Wohl@colostate.edu;
Ellen Wohl is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Colorado State University. She received a PhD in geosciences from the University of Arizona and has been on the CSU faculty since 1989. She is a fluvial geomorphologist and currently focuses on interactions between physical processes and biota as these influence form and function in river corridors. Much of her work has focused on mountain streams and rivers in bedrock canyons. She has conducted field work on every continent but Antarctica and authored or coauthored more than 200 scientific papers and 18 books. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America.