Award Abstract # 1415418
SEES Fellows: An Integrative Model of Riparian Ecosystem Dynamics to Support Sustainable Management of Regulated Rivers

NSF Org: RISE
Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research (ICER)
Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA
Initial Amendment Date: June 30, 2014
Latest Amendment Date: May 29, 2018
Award Number: 1415418
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Thomas Torgersen
RISE
 Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research (ICER)
GEO
 Directorate for Geosciences
Start Date: September 1, 2014
End Date: December 31, 2018 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $375,161.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $375,161.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2014 = $375,161.00
History of Investigator:
  • Rebecca Diehl (Principal Investigator)
    rdiehl@uvm.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: University of Montana
32 CAMPUS DR
MISSOULA
MT  US  59812-0003
(406)243-6670
Sponsor Congressional District: 01
Primary Place of Performance: University of Montana
32 Campus Drive #1296
Missoula
MT  US  59801-4302
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
01
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): DAY7Z8ZD48Q3
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): SEES Fellows,
EPSCoR Co-Funding
Primary Program Source: 01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 9178, 9150
Program Element Code(s): 805500, 915000
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.050

ABSTRACT

Sustainable river management requires strategically balancing the various, and often conflicting, demands placed on a river system. Human priorities must be met within a framework that also satisfies ecological needs. The challenge to provide for water supply demands while maintaining environmental flows is particularly striking in the water-limited Colorado River basin. The Colorado has historically been managed for complete reliability of water deliveries by taking advantage of the basin's large dams and extraordinary reservoir storage capacity. Within the past few decades, however, consumption has surpassed supply. This project will explore the dominant processes that shape the current condition of ecosystems along the large rivers of the Colorado River basin. Research results will help inform the management of ecologically sustainable water systems that integrate human and ecological needs. The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. With SEES Fellows support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish themselves in an independent research career related to sustainability.

This project develops, tests and applies a hydrologically driven model of riparian ecosystem dynamics for evaluation of ecosystem response to altered flow regimes. The dominant processes that shape the current condition of riparian ecosystems along the large rivers of the Colorado River basin will be captured in a modeling framework by building interrelated vegetation and geomorphic flow response curves. The interdisciplinary approach will push the one-way relationship characteristic of many vegetation response models towards a more realistic model of interactions and feedbacks between biotic and abiotic factors. Concepts and methods will be applied to two areas of the upper Colorado River basin that represent the variability in geomorphic organization, hydrologic alteration, sediment mass balance conditions, and management contexts that exist within the basin. The work takes advantage of the relatively well-established understanding of riparian ecology and geomorphology in these settings and proposes new field data collection and ecological, hydrologic, and hydraulic modeling. The project will 1) address both physical and ecological processes and their associated interactions, 2) integrate finer scale interactions that fundamentally shape ecosystems and the larger scales of river organization at which river managers work, 3) adopt the simple methodology of environmental gradients and non-taxonomic guilding of species based upon traits so that the approach may be generalized and applied over large spatial scales, and 4) provide a spatially-explicit identification of the trade-offs in riparian ecosystem condition for a given flow scenario. The SEES Fellow, Dr. Rebecca Manners, works with host mentor Dr. Andrew Wilcox at the University of Montana, and with partner mentor Dr. David Merritt at the USDA Forest Service National Stream and Aquatic Ecology Center in Fort Collins, Colorado. The project is co-funded by the EPSCoR program at NSF.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Rebecca M. Diehl, David M. Merritt, Andrew C. Wilcox, and Michael L. Scott "Applying Functional Traits to Ecogeomorphic Processes in Riparian Ecosystems" Bioscience , v.67 , 2018 , p.729
Rebecca M. Diehl, Andrew C. Wilcox, David M. Merritt, Dustin W. Perkins, and Julian A. Scott "Development of an eco-geomorphic modeling framework to evaluate riparian ecosystem response to flow-regime changes" Ecological Engineering , 2018
Rebecca Manners Diehl, Andrew Wilcox, John Stella, Li Kui, Leonard Sklar, and Anne Lightbody "Fluvial sediment supply and pioneer woody seedlings as a control on bar-surface topography" Earth Surface Processes and Landforms , 2016 10.1002/esp.4017
Sharon Bywater-Reyes, Rebecca M. Diehl, and Andrew C. Wilcox "The influence of a vegetated bar on channel-bend flow dynamics" Earth Surface Dynamics , v.6 , 2018 , p.487
Sharon Bywater-ReyesRebecca M. DiehlAndrew C. Wilcox "The influence of a vegetated bar on channel-bend flow dynamics" Earth Surface Dynamics , v.6 , 2018
RM Diehl, D Merritt, A Wilcox, ML Scott "Applying functional traits to ecogeomorphic processes in riparian ecosystems" BioScience , v.67 , 2017 , p.729 10.1093/biosci/bix080
Rebecca M Diehl, David M Merritt, Andrew C Wilcox, Michael L Scott "Applying functional traits to ecogeomorphic processes in riparian ecosystems" Bioscience , v.67 , 2017

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

Intellectual Merit: This project developed a conceptual framework for, tested, and applied to future flow scenarios, an ecogeomorphic model of riparian ecosystem dynamics, capable of predicting shifts to riparian plant composition and the physical template with a shift in hydrologic attributes. At its foundation, the ecogeomorphic model consists of a series of flow response curves (i.e., empirically-derived relationships between environmental control and response variables) built from data collected on semi-arid rivers in the upper Colorado River Basin. To incorporate process linkages among streamflow properties, physical processes, and plant community response in our model, we used plant functional groups (i.e., guilds). A strong linkage exists between plant functional traits important for (a) determining a plant’s response to environmental conditions and (b) for predicting its impact on the flow of water and transport of sediment. As part of this project, we hypothesized, and demonstrated, the relationship between ecological-response traits and morphological-effect traits. Our work is among the first to develop response curves for both physical and ecological processes in the same framework. The shape of the curves indicate that the functioning of riparian ecosystems is driven by nonlinear relationships and that clear, identifiable thresholds exist. As such, we hypothesized that components of the riparian ecosystem vary in their vulnerabilities to shifts in flow attributes, and that changes in the representation of functional groups of plants integrate this complex response. We tested this hypothesis by applying potential future flow regimes to the ecogeomorphic model for sites on the Yampa and Green Rivers in Dinosaur National Monument, CO and UT. We show that riparian plant distribution, composition, and cover are more sensitive to the small discharges that occur late in the growing season than larger, less frequent flows. Future flow regimes are likely to lead to more densely vegetated surfaces lower in the channel that are dominated by fewer functional groups of plants. Reduced functional diversity in the recent past has led to degraded aquatic and riparian habitat throughout the region, and predictions of greater reductions suggest that this trend will continue. Management of late-season discharges (i.e., baseflows) may potentially mitigate for ecosystem functioning that is otherwise sensitive to hydrologic alteration induced by climate change. Overall this study contributed a new understanding of the process linkages between riparian plants and physical processes and successfully incorporated such linkages in an ecogeomorphic modeling framework capable of making predictions about the trajectory of changes that are likely to occur given shifts in hydrologic attributes.

Broader Impact: This project resulted in involvement of graduate and undergraduate students in the field and laboratory and numerous training and professional development opportunities for a postdoctoral researcher. The ecogeomorphic model and its results may be specifically applied to management of the Yampa and Green Rivers in Dinosaur National Monument, and the general framework developed as part of this project may be adapted by other researchers to assess the impacts of shifts in flow regimes in other riparian settings. Outreach efforts have included public talks at meetings and conferences to other professionals and stakeholders, engagement of water resource managers in the Yampa and Green River basin, and participation in an expert panel.

 


Last Modified: 03/20/2019
Modified by: Rebecca Diehl

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