SEES Fellows: An Integrative Model of Riparian Ecosystem Dynamics to Support Sustainable Management of Regulated Rivers

可持续的河流管理需要在战略上平衡对河流系统的各种需求，这些需求往往是相互冲突的。人类的优先事项必须在同时满足生态需要的框架内得到满足。在水资源有限的科罗拉多河流域，在满足供水需求的同时保持环境流动的挑战尤为突出。从历史上看，科罗拉多河通过利用盆地的大型水坝和非凡的水库储存能力，实现了供水的完全可靠性。然而，在过去的几十年里，消费已经超过了供应。该项目将探索沿科罗拉多河流域大河形成生态系统现状的主要过程。研究结果将有助于为整合人类和生态需求的生态可持续水系统的管理提供信息。该项目由美国国家科学基金会（NSF）科学、工程和教育可持续发展研究员（SEES研究员）计划支持，其目标是帮助实现必要的发现，为导致环境、能源和社会可持续发展的行动提供信息，同时创造必要的劳动力来应对这些挑战。在see研究员的支持下，该项目将使有前途的早期职业研究人员能够在与可持续性相关的独立研究生涯中建立自己的职业生涯。该项目开发、测试并应用了一个水文驱动的河岸生态系统动力学模型，用于评估生态系统对改变的水流状态的响应。通过建立相互关联的植被和地貌流响应曲线，将在建模框架中捕获形成科罗拉多河流域大河沿岸生态系统现状的主要过程。跨学科的方法将推动许多植被响应模型的单向关系特征向生物和非生物因素之间相互作用和反馈的更现实的模型发展。概念和方法将应用于科罗拉多河上游流域的两个区域，这两个区域代表了流域内存在的地貌组织、水文变化、沉积物质量平衡条件和管理环境的可变性。这项工作利用了对这些环境中河岸生态和地貌的相对成熟的理解，并提出了新的野外数据收集和生态、水文和水力建模。该项目将1)解决物理和生态过程及其相关的相互作用，2)整合从根本上塑造生态系统和河流管理者工作的更大尺度的河流组织的更精细的相互作用，3)采用环境梯度和基于特征的物种非分类指导的简单方法，以便该方法可以推广并应用于大的空间尺度。4)在给定流量情景下，对河岸生态系统条件下的权衡提供了空间明确的识别。see研究员丽贝卡·曼纳斯博士与蒙大拿大学的主持导师安德鲁·威尔科克斯博士以及科罗拉多州柯林斯堡美国农业部林业局国家溪流和水生生态中心的合作伙伴大卫·梅里特博士一起工作。该项目由美国国家科学基金会EPSCoR项目共同资助。

Sustainable river management requires strategically balancing the various, and often conflicting, demands placed on a river system. Human priorities must be met within a framework that also satisfies ecological needs. The challenge to provide for water supply demands while maintaining environmental flows is particularly striking in the water-limited Colorado River basin. The Colorado has historically been managed for complete reliability of water deliveries by taking advantage of the basin's large dams and extraordinary reservoir storage capacity. Within the past few decades, however, consumption has surpassed supply. This project will explore the dominant processes that shape the current condition of ecosystems along the large rivers of the Colorado River basin. Research results will help inform the management of ecologically sustainable water systems that integrate human and ecological needs. The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. With SEES Fellows support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish themselves in an independent research career related to sustainability.This project develops, tests and applies a hydrologically driven model of riparian ecosystem dynamics for evaluation of ecosystem response to altered flow regimes. The dominant processes that shape the current condition of riparian ecosystems along the large rivers of the Colorado River basin will be captured in a modeling framework by building interrelated vegetation and geomorphic flow response curves. The interdisciplinary approach will push the one-way relationship characteristic of many vegetation response models towards a more realistic model of interactions and feedbacks between biotic and abiotic factors. Concepts and methods will be applied to two areas of the upper Colorado River basin that represent the variability in geomorphic organization, hydrologic alteration, sediment mass balance conditions, and management contexts that exist within the basin. The work takes advantage of the relatively well-established understanding of riparian ecology and geomorphology in these settings and proposes new field data collection and ecological, hydrologic, and hydraulic modeling. The project will 1) address both physical and ecological processes and their associated interactions, 2) integrate finer scale interactions that fundamentally shape ecosystems and the larger scales of river organization at which river managers work, 3) adopt the simple methodology of environmental gradients and non-taxonomic guilding of species based upon traits so that the approach may be generalized and applied over large spatial scales, and 4) provide a spatially-explicit identification of the trade-offs in riparian ecosystem condition for a given flow scenario. The SEES Fellow, Dr. Rebecca Manners, works with host mentor Dr. Andrew Wilcox at the University of Montana, and with partner mentor Dr. David Merritt at the USDA Forest Service National Stream and Aquatic Ecology Center in Fort Collins, Colorado. The project is co-funded by the EPSCoR program at NSF.