Floodplain management: opportunies, challenges, and successes

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 19:00:00 -0500

In California, flood control and floodplain restoration constitute active areas of research for academics and concerns for agency personnel. The REACH students made several novel contributions to this effort. First, in their modeling work, they linked the output from hydraulic models to demographic models used by ecologists to describe population growth. Their results therefore connect flow parameters to organismal growth. This approach may aid water resource managers in developing flood control projects that maximally benefit species that depend on floodplains for growth and survival. Second, the analysis of the environmental history of river modification yielded insights into the social and political conditions that may enhance the success of a particular project. Moreover, integrating considerations from both the hard sciences and the social sciences allowed the students to find ways to think about restoration projects that could benefit a broader socio-ecological system.