https://reasonstobecheerful.world/letting-a-river-act-like-a-river/
"For river ecosystems to survive dry times, they need their floods — and big,
messy floodplains.
In a case study recently published in
Hydrological Processes, co-authors
Ellen Soles, Martha Cooper and Laurel Saito demonstrate how channels formed
during high flows on the Gila River connect native riparian vegetation to
groundwater.
Currently The Nature Conservancy’s freshwater program director for New Mexico,
Cooper spent years living with her family at the Gila River Preserve and Lichty
Ecological Research Center in the Cliff-Gila Valley, just downstream from where
the river emerges from the Gila Wilderness.
“Science is an act of love,” Cooper says, recalling the years she and Soles
spent thrashing across the river, transect by transect, measuring topography
and vegetation changes, and learning about the riparian system’s complexity.
They also learned about the channels left behind when high flows roar and braid
across the floodplain, then recede. These secondary channels allow native trees
and plants to reach groundwater and spread, even when surface flows are low or
nearly dry. “I didn’t ever think about groundwater until I moved to the Gila,
and there was this moment,” says Cooper: “When the river was up — in
pseudo-flood — and Ellen and I were walking down to a transect, my foot kind of
broke through the soil and literally there was water rushing underneath my
foot.” It was probably an old surface channel, sedimented over, and still alive
underground."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
