Global increases in the occurrence of large, severe wildfires in forested watersheds threaten drinking water supplies and aquatic ecology. Wildfire effects on water quality, particularly nutrient levels and forms, can be significant. The longevity and downstream propagation of these effects as well as the geochemical mechanisms regulating them remain largely undocumented at larger river basin s...

According to Connell’s intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH), diversity within a community is maximal at intermediate frequencies and intensities of disturbances. In order to test the IDH, disturbances of different frequencies and intensities were imposed on natural plankton communities in controlled field experiments. These disturbances consisted of an artificial deepening of the mixed lay...

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to implement a methodology based on stakeholder’s judgment with assistance of fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods to assess the environmental impact. Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is used as a multi-level decision-making tool taking into consideration human evaluation; it captures the vagueness in ordinal judgments obtained from s...

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD), which was adopted in 2000, changed water management in all member states of the European Union fundamentally, putting aquatic ecology at the base of management decisions. Here we review the successes and problems encountered with implementation of the WFD over the past 10years and provide recommendations to further improve the implementation process...

A recent attempt at mapping submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) species composition of a clear water stream in Belgium from ultrahigh resolution, multispectral photographs, using object based image analysis (OBIA), resulted in a low, but consistent overall classification accuracy (53-61%). Since the results were obtained with a single rule set they show promise for the development of an automate...

The terms ecohydrology and hydro-ecology (also written as eco-hydrology and hydroecology) are now in common usage. A search on the Internet comes up with a plethora of related entries. There are university units, study courses, research projects, scientific conferences, and journal papers devoted to ecohydrology. There are several books with ecohydrology (or hydro-ecology) in the title and even...

Organic chemicals entering surface waters may interact with aquatic macrophytes, which in turn may reduce potential negative effects on aquatic organisms. The overall objective of the present study was to determine the significance of aquatic macrophytes to the retention of organic chemicals in slow-flowing streams and thus their contribution to the mitigation of the risks that these compounds ...

Boreal regions store most of the global terrestrial carbon, which can be transferred as dissolved organic carbon (DOC) to inland waters with implications for both aquatic ecology and carbon budgets. Headwater riparian zones (RZ) are important sources of DOC, and often just a narrow 'dominant source layer' (DSL) within the riparian profile is responsible for most of the DOC export. Two important...

The spatial distribution of organisms in patchy environments can be determined by the relationship between habitat quality and animal behaviour. In species with complex life cycles, such as pond-breeding amphibians, the selection of a suitable wetland is crucial. While the traditional view of amphibian ecology suggests strong site fidelity and low vagility, more recent research highlights mecha...

sons, except in a limited role of reference for a specific topic. It is an excellent book for the biologist, particularly the aquatic biologist, and is highly recommended for their general use. In addition it is a fine reference for those concerned with developing, establishing, and planning programs of water pollution control. It is unfortunate that the word "control" has been used in the titl...