Turning over a new leaf: the role of novel riparian ecosystems in catchment management

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Author(s)
Capon, Samantha
Palmer, Gary
Year published
2018
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Novel riparian ecosystems, comprising new combinations of species and/or artificial elements (i.e. human infrastructure), are an inevitable and increasingly common component of catchments, especially in human-dominated landscapes. While posing numerous risks to riverine biodiversity and ecosystems, novel riparian (and upland) ecosystems can also have many beneficial effects at local and catchment scales and may help address critical river management problems, e.g. bank erosion, degraded water quality. Furthermore, conventional management approaches (e.g., weed control and eradication) can be ineffective, expensive, time ...
View more >Novel riparian ecosystems, comprising new combinations of species and/or artificial elements (i.e. human infrastructure), are an inevitable and increasingly common component of catchments, especially in human-dominated landscapes. While posing numerous risks to riverine biodiversity and ecosystems, novel riparian (and upland) ecosystems can also have many beneficial effects at local and catchment scales and may help address critical river management problems, e.g. bank erosion, degraded water quality. Furthermore, conventional management approaches (e.g., weed control and eradication) can be ineffective, expensive, time consuming and associated with a range of unintended outcomes (e.g., soil disturbance, habitat loss etc.). We advocate that catchment planning and management consider the retention and even enhancement of some novel ecosystems for the benefit of biodiversity and ecosystem functions, particularly given the implications of climate change.
View less >
View more >Novel riparian ecosystems, comprising new combinations of species and/or artificial elements (i.e. human infrastructure), are an inevitable and increasingly common component of catchments, especially in human-dominated landscapes. While posing numerous risks to riverine biodiversity and ecosystems, novel riparian (and upland) ecosystems can also have many beneficial effects at local and catchment scales and may help address critical river management problems, e.g. bank erosion, degraded water quality. Furthermore, conventional management approaches (e.g., weed control and eradication) can be ineffective, expensive, time consuming and associated with a range of unintended outcomes (e.g., soil disturbance, habitat loss etc.). We advocate that catchment planning and management consider the retention and even enhancement of some novel ecosystems for the benefit of biodiversity and ecosystem functions, particularly given the implications of climate change.
View less >
Journal Title
Solutions
Volume
9
Issue
3
Publisher URI
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2018. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) which permits unrestricted distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.
Subject
Ecology not elsewhere classified