Plant Roots Steer Resilience to Perturbation of River Floodplains

Freshwater ecosystems along river floodplains host among the greatest biodiversity on Earth and are known to respond anthropic pressure. For water impounded systems, resilience changes in natural flow regime is believed be bidirectional. Whether such prevents system from returning pristine conditions after reverse as yet unclear, though widely documented. In this work, we show that temporal irreversibility of recover their status may explained by dynamics riparian water-tolerant plant roots. Our model a quantitative tool will benefit scientists practitioners predicting impact changing regimes long-term floodplain dynamics.