Examines interrelations between flood management, flooding, and environmental change, for advanced students, researchers, and practitioners.

Historically, the flow of sediment in the Missouri River has been as important as the flow of water for a variety of river functions. The sediment has helped form a dynamic network of islands, sandbars, and floodplains, and provided habitats for native species. Further downstream, sediment transported by the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers has helped build and sustain the coastal wetlands of the Mississippi River delta. The construction of dams and river bank control structures on the Missouri River and its tributaries, however, has markedly reduced the volume of sediment transported by the river. These projects have had several ecological impacts, most notably on some native fish and bird species that depended on habitats and landforms created by sediment flow. Missouri River Planning describes the historic role of sediment in the Missouri River, evaluates current habitat restoration strategies, and discusses possible sediment management alternatives. The book finds that a better understanding of the processes of sediment transport, erosion, and deposition in the Missouri River will be useful in furthering river management objectives, such as protection of endangered species and development of water quality standards.

This volume provides a comprehensive perspective on geomorphic approaches to management of lowland alluvial rivers in North America and Europe. Many lowland rivers have been heavily managed for flood control and navigation for decades or centuries, resulting in engineered channels and embanked floodplains with substantially altered sediment loads and geomorphic processes. Over the past decade, floodplain management of many lowland rivers has taken on new importance because of concerns about the potential for global environmental change to alter floodplain processes, necessitating revised management strategies that minimize flood risk while enhancing environmental attributes of floodplains influenced by local embankments and upstream dams. Recognition of the failure of old perspectives on river management and the need to enhance environmental sustainability has stimulated a new approach to river management. The manner that river restoration and integrated management are implemented, however, requires a case study approach that takes into account the impact of historic human impacts to the system, especially engineering. The river basins examined in this volume provide a representative coverage of the drainage of North America and Europe, taking into account a range of climatic and physiographic provinces. They include the 1) Sacramento (California, USA), 2) San Joaquin (California), 3) Missouri (Missouri, USA), 4) Red (Manitoba, Canada and Minnesota, USA), 5) Mississippi (Louisiana, USA), 6) Kissimmee (Florida, USA), 7) Ebro (Spain), 8) Rhone (France), 9) Rhine (Netherlands), 10) Danube (Romania), and 11) Volga (Russian Federation) Rivers. The case studies covered in these chapters span a range of fluvial modes of adjustment, including sediment, channel, hydrologic regime, floodplains, as well as ecosystem and environmental associations.

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Geophysical Monograph Series, Volume 194. Stream Restoration in Dynamic Fluvial Systems: Scientific Approaches, Analyses, and Tools brings together leading contributors in stream restoration science to provide comprehensive consideration of process-based approaches, tools, and applications of techniques useful for the implementation of sustainable restoration strategies. Stream restoration is a catchall term for modifications to streams and adjacent riparian zones undertaken to improve geomorphic and/or ecologic function, structure, and integrity of river corridors, and it has become a multibillion dollar industry. A vigorous debate currently exists in research and professional communities regarding the approaches, applications, and tools most effective in designing, implementing, and assessing stream restoration strategies given a multitude of goals, objectives, stakeholders, and boundary conditions. More importantly, stream restoration as a research-oriented academic discipline is, at present, lagging stream restoration as a rapidly evolving, practitioner-centric endeavor. The volume addresses these main areas: concepts in stream restoration, river mechanics and the use of hydraulic structures, modeling in restoration design, ecology, ecologic indices, and habitat, geomorphic approaches to stream and watershed management, and sediment considerations in stream restoration. Stream Restoration in Dynamic Fluvial Systems will appeal to scholars, professionals, and government agency and institute researchers involved in examining river flow processes, river channel changes and improvements, watershed processes, and landscape systematics.

Landscape—the unique combination of landforms, plants, animals, and weather that compose any natural place—is inherently transient. Each essay in Transient Landscapes introduces this idea of a constantly metamorphosing global landscape, revealing how to see the ubiquity of landscape transience, both that which results through Earth’s natural environmental and climatological processes and that which comes from human intervention. The essays are grouped by type of environmental change: long-term, large-scale transformation driven by geologic forces such as tectonic uplift and volcanism; natural variability at shorter time scales, such as seasonal flooding; and modifications resulting from human activities, such as timber harvest, land drainage, and pollution. Each essay is set in a unique geographic location—including such diverse places as New Zealand, Northern California, Costa Rica, and the Scottish Highlands—and is largely drawn from Wohl’s personal experience researching in the field. A combination of travel writing, nature writing, and science writing, Transient Landscapes is a beautiful and thoughtful journey through the natural world.

The changing focus and approach of geomorphic research suggests that the time is opportune for a summary of the state of discipline. The number of peer-reviewed papers published in geomorphic journals has grown steadily for more than two decades and, more importantly, the diversity of authors with respect to geographic location and disciplinary background (geography, geology, ecology, civil engineering, computer science, geographic information science, and others) has expanded dramatically. As more good minds are drawn to geomorphology, and the breadth of the peer-reviewed literature grows, an effective summary of contemporary geomorphic knowledge becomes increasingly difficult. The fourteen volumes of this Treatise on Geomorphology will provide an important reference for users from undergraduate students looking for term paper topics, to graduate students starting a literature review for their thesis work, and professionals seeking a concise summary of a particular topic. Information on the historical development of diverse topics within geomorphology provides context for ongoing research; discussion of research strategies, equipment, and field methods, laboratory experiments, and numerical simulations reflect the multiple approaches to understanding Earth’s surfaces; and summaries of outstanding research questions highlight future challenges and suggest productive new avenues for research. Our future ability to adapt to geomorphic changes in the critical zone very much hinges upon how well landform scientists comprehend the dynamics of Earth’s diverse surfaces. This Treatise on Geomorphology provides a useful synthesis of the state of the discipline, as well as highlighting productive research directions, that Educators and students/researchers will find useful. Geomorphology has advanced greatly in the last 10 years to become a very interdisciplinary field. Undergraduate students looking for term paper topics, to graduate students starting a literature review for their thesis work, and professionals seeking a concise summary of a particular topic will find the answers they need in this broad reference work which has been designed and written to accommodate their diverse backgrounds and levels of understanding Editor-in-Chief, Prof. J. F. Shroder of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, is past president of the QG&G section of the Geological Society of America and present Trustee of the GSA Foundation, while being well respected in the geomorphology research community and having won numerous awards in the field. A host of noted international geomorphologists have contributed state-of-the-art chapters to the work. Readers can be guaranteed that every chapter in this extensive work has been critically reviewed for consistency and accuracy by the World expert Volume Editors and by the Editor-in-Chief himself No other reference work exists in the area of Geomorphology that offers the breadth and depth of information contained in this 14-volume masterpiece. From the foundations and history of geomorphology through to geomorphological innovations and computer modelling, and the past and future states of landform science, no "stone" has been left unturned!

Interweaving the human aspects of river control with analysis of hydro-physical data, including historical data over the last few centuries, this monograph is a comprehensive evaluation of the Damodar’s lower reaches. While the Damodar River isn’t an exceptional tropical river, nor does it feature classic examples of river control structures, it is unusual and worthy of study due to the fact that nowhere else in the tropical world have riverine sandbars been used as a resource base as well as for permanent settlements. Based on their knowledge of river stages, the inhabitants have fine-tuned their land use to flood events, applying a concept of flood zoning to the riverbed. Every available space has been utilized rationally and judiciously. This rare human-environmental study analyzes the remarkable way in which immigrants unfamiliar with the riverine environment have adapted to the altered hydrologic regime of the river. In doing so they have demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the flood regime and the vagaries of an unpromising environment in their land use, cropping and settlement patterns. Spurred on by restricted social and economic mobility and sometimes political constraints, these self-settled refugees have learned to adapt to their environment and live with the floods. Bhattacharyya’s text is particularly timely, as anthropogenic processes of this kind have not been adequately studied by geographers.

Worldwide demand for sand and gravel is increasing daily, as the need for these materials continues to rise, for example in the construction sector, in land filling and for transportation sector based infrastructural projects. This results in over-extraction of sand from channel beds, and hampers the natural renewal of sediment, geological setup and morphological processes of the riverine system. In India, illegal sand mining (of alluvial channels) and gravel mining (of perennial channels) are two anthropogenic issues that negatively affect the sustainable drainage system. Along the Kangsabati River in India, the consequences of sand mining are very serious. The construction of Mukutmonipur Dam (1958) on the river causes huge sediment deposition along the middle and downstream areas, these same areas are also intensely mined for sand (instream and on the flood plain). Geospatial models are applied in order to better understand the state and the resilience of stream hydraulics, morphological and river ecosystem variables during pre-mining and post-mining stages, using micro-level datasets of the Kangsabati River. The book also includes practicable measures to minimize the environmental consequences of instream mining in respect to optimum sand mining. It discusses the threshold limits of each variable in stream hydraulics, morphological and river ecological regime, and also discusses the most affected variables. Consequently, all outputs will be very useful for students, researchers, academicians, decision makers and practitioners and will facilitate applying these techniques to create models for other river basins.