Premium
Large Rivers in the Anthropocene: Insights and tools for understanding climatic, land use, and reservoir influences
Author(s) -
Habersack Helmut,
Haspel Daniel,
Kondolf Mathias
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
water resources research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.863
H-Index - 217
eISSN - 1944-7973
pISSN - 0043-1397
DOI - 10.1002/2013wr014731
Subject(s) - anthropocene , environmental science , land use , earth science , hydrology (agriculture) , climate change , geology , physical geography , climatology , geography , oceanography , ecology , paleontology , geotechnical engineering , biology
Since the industrial revolution, human impacts on landscapes and river systems globally have intensified significantly. Humans nowadays artificially increase and decrease fluxes of water, sediment and nutrients on a scale far exceeding natural fluxes. Rivers integrate such changes occurring throughout their drainage basins, and thus can be considered as indicators of landscape processes and river basin “health” more broadly. This special issue brings together a set of papers that explore interactions of climate change and river processes, influences of land use changes, effects of reservoirs, as well as new approaches to sorting out the relative importance of these diverse influences on rivers and uncertainties in modeling future behavior. These papers contribute to a growing body of work demonstrating the fundamental differences between large rivers in the Anthropocene and rivers in prior time periods.