To restore declining species, including Populus euphratica and other riparian communities, in the river ecosystem of the lower Tarim River, the ecological water conveyance project (EWCP), as a part of an integrated water resource management plan, was implemented in 2000. The EWCP aims to schedule and manage the water resources in the upper reaches and transfer water to the lower reaches by a se...

Pristine floodplain forests are virtually nonexistent in the eastern United States, requiring that preservation efforts focus on relatively intact representatives of these unique ecosystems, many situated where hydrologic modifications are the norm. This article examines the vegetation dynamics for one such natural area, a wilderness island in northwestern Pennsylvania, to assess how the ecolog...

Wetland indicator status (WIS) describes the habitat affinity of plant species and is used in wetland delineations and resource inventories. Understanding how species-level functional traits vary across WIS categories may improve designations, elucidate mechanisms of adaptation, and explain habitat optima and niche. We investigated differences in species-level traits of riparian flora across WI...

Riparian areas are noted for their high biodiversity, but this has rarely been tested across a wide range of taxonomic groups. We set out to describe species richness, species abundance, and community similarity patterns for 11 taxonomic groups (forbs & grasses, shrubs, trees, solpugids, spiders, scarab beetles, butterflies, lizards, birds, rodents, and mammalian carnivores) individually and fo...

Information about the spatial distribution of riparian vegetation, and the ecosystem services it provides, is required to prioritise the protection and restoration of riparian zones within watersheds. Large woody debris performs a range of fluvial geomorphic and ecological functions within streams. This paper describes a new technique for estimating how much large woody debris is provided by ri...

Forest harvesting can increase solar radiation in the riparian zone as well as wind speed and exposure to air advected from clearings, typically causing increases in summertime air, soil, and stream temperatures and decreases in relative humidity. Stream temperature increases following forest harvesting are primarily controlled by changes in insolation but also depend on stream hydrology and ch...

Anthropogenic land-cover change is driving biodiversity loss worldwide. At the epicenter of this crisis lies Southeast Asia, where biodiversity-rich forests are being converted to oil-palm monocultures. As demand for palm oil increases, there is an urgent need to find strategies that maintain biodiversity in plantations. Previous studies found that retaining forest patches within plantations be...

14 USDA Forest Service Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-110. 1989. Abstract: Riparian communities established along Elder Creek, a tributary of the upper South Fork Eel River, are bounded by two frequencies of periodic flooding. The upper limit for the riparian zone occurs at bankfull stage. The lower riparian limit is associated with a more frequent stage height, called the active channel, having an exceed...

Riparian forests can provide an important service for aquatic ecosystems by sequestering hillslopederived sediments. However, the width of a riparian buffer zone required to filter sediments is not yet wellunderstood. Here are used two complementary tracers to measure sediment retention. The 137Cs technique and the soil carbon isotopic ratios (delta13C) are utilized to investigate sediment depo...

This research presents a time-effective approach for mapping streambed and riparian zone extent from high spatial resolution LiDAR derived products, i.e. digital terrain model, terrain slope and plant projective cover. Geographic object based image analysis (GEOBIA) has proven useful for feature extraction from high spatial resolution image data because of the capacity to reduce effects of refl...