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Billions of dollars are being spent in the United States to restore rivers to a desired, yet often unknown, reference condition. In lieu of a known reference, practitioners typically assume the paradigm of a connected watercourse. Geological and ecological processes, however, create patchy and discontinuous fluvial systems. One of these processes, dam building by North American beavers (Castor canadensis), generated discontinuities throughout precolonial river systems of northern North America. Under modern conditions, beaver dams create dynamic sequences of ponds and wet meadows among free-flowing segments. One beaver impoundment alone can exceed 1000 meters along the river, flood the valley laterally, and fundamentally...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation,
Journal Citation;
Tags: American Institute of Biological Sciences,
BioScience,
fluvial geomorphology,
hierarchical patch dynamics,
river continuum concept,
In this paper, we synthesize a series of small dam removal studies to examine how changes in channel form can affect riparian vegetation, fish, macroinvertebrates, mussels, and nutrient dynamics. Each of the ecosystem attributes responded to the disturbance of dam removal in different ways and recovered at very different rates, ranging from months to decades. Riparian vegetation appeared to require the greatest time for recovery, while macroinvertebrates had the least. Mussel communities were the most adversely affected group of species and showed no signs of recovery during the time period of the study. Based on these and other studies, we suggest that ecosystems may follow two trajectories of recovery following...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Biogeomorphology,
Dam removal,
Disturbance,
Ecohydrology,
Recovery,
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