Rivers are the major pathways connecting the land to the sea, conveying water, sediments and nutrients. As water flows through river networks, the materials it carries are transported, stored, processed, and released in response to changing physical, chemical and biological characteristics. The goal of this project is to better understand how river systems process carbon, retain nutrients, influence ecosystem health globally, and ultimately support healthy ecosystems, both in the rivers and the water bodies into which they drain. One of the concepts upon which river ecosystem science is founded is that rivers change their characteristics and processing rates with size and/or distance downstream. This idea, called the River Continuum Concept (RCC), has helped organize decades of river research and management. However, while the RCC has been a useful conceptual model, it remains relatively poorly tested, which seriously limits the ability of scientists to predict how river functions will respond to ongoing and future changes on Earth. This work seeks to fill that important knowledge gap about how rivers function, and thus has implications for how humans manage land and water resources.
One constraint to providing information about river function along the river continuum has been technological; we simply have not had the tools to measure these functions along river networks. A second constraint has been that the simple conceptual model of the RCC neglects key features of rivers, specifically that they are frequently impacted by discontinuities like dams and lakes, tributary confluences, and geologic divides. This project alleviates both constraints by coupling state-of-the-art water quality sensor technologies to new sampling methods in carefully selected river sites. Together, these advances are expected to provide new insights about the river continuum, the role of discontinuities in changing river functions, and ultimately about how to best manage and protect aquatic resources.
