Researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno have completed one of the most extensive river resilience studies, examining how river ecosystems recover following floods.
Researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno have completed one of the most extensive river resilience studies, examining how river ecosystems recover following floods. They developed a novel modeling approach that used data from oxygen sensors placed in rivers to estimate daily growth in aquatic plants and algae. The researchers then modeled the algal and plant biomass in 143 rivers across the contiguous U.S. to quantify what magnitude of flooding disturbs the biomass and how long the rivers take to recover from floods. Increased understanding of rivers’ resiliency is important to maintaining healthy rivers, as human actions can affect flood regimes and change the conditions in rivers for other aquatic life that may rely on algae and plants as a food source.
Assistant Professor Joanna Blaszczak and Postdoctoral Scholar Heili Lowman, both in the University’s College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources and Global Water Center led the research, which was published in two separate journal articles. The preliminary work, led by Blaszczak and published in Ecology Letters last June, first studied six rivers and laid the groundwork and methodology for the second study, which Blaszczak hired Lowman to conduct, examining the 143 rivers. The results of that research were just published last month in PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
The research is unique because it estimates changes in biomass in rivers more frequently than ever before without needing to directly sample rivers. This is done by using both data from oxygen sensors placed in the rivers by the U.S. Geological Survey and a population model of algal and plant biomass – similar to a human population model that models change in the number of people over time, but instead modeling the change in the amount of algae and plants. The oxygen sensors began collecting data in 2007, and the most recent Nevada-led study of 143 rivers includes some data that are for nine years running, among the longest such records on file for rivers across the globe.
Read more at University of Nevada, Reno
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