RECORD - Restored corridor dynamics
River restoration is an essential tool to achieve “good ecological status” of water courses as required by European and Swiss legislation. Although the number of restoration projects has increased in recent years, scientific understanding of the underlying principles determining how hydromorphological variability in restored corridors of rivers relates to ecosystem functioning, to biodiversity and to water quality is still limited.
The general scientific goal of the project RECORD is to gain a mechanistic understanding of how the river-river corridor-groundwater system functions in hydrological, biogeochemical and ecological terms. The projects aim at estimating how these interactions are altered by river restoration measures. For this purpose, a restored and a channelized section of Swiss River Thur were instrumented as large-scale field experimental sites.
In our subproject we aim to link the hydrological connectivity and the spatial configuration of a river/floodplain system to the biogeochemical transformations of organic matter and nutrients. The availability and the transformation of nutrients and organic matter are crucial for the functioning of an ecosystem. By analyzing this transformation and transport processes we intend to understand the influence of environmental heterogeneity on ecosystem functioning.
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Funding
- CCES, April 2007 - March 2011
Collaborators
- Mario Schirmer (Eawag)
- Olaf A. Cirpka (Eawag)
- Rolf Kipfer (Eawag)
- Eduard Hoehn (Eawag)
- Juliane Hollender (Eawag)
- Klement Tockner (IGB, Berlin)
- Alan Green (ETH)
- Niklas Linde (ETH)
- Stuart Greenhalgh (ETH)
- Paolo Burlando (ETH)
- Paolo Perona (ETH)
- Edith Durisch-Kaiser (ETH)
- Jörg Luster (WSL)
- Elisabeth Graf Pannatier (WSL)
- Edward Mitchell (WSL)
- D. Andrew Barry (EPFL)