21 articles
Blackwater river
A blackwater river, or blackwater stream, is a river stained tea-brown to black by dissolved humic acids from decaying vegetation, transparent and acidic; the Rio Negro is the largest example.
Canopy cover
Canopy cover is the proportion of ground or stream surface covered by the vertical projection of vegetation canopies, a standard metric in forestry and stream monitoring.
Coarse particulate organic matter
Coarse particulate organic matter (CPOM) is the fraction of aquatic detritus larger than 1 mm, chiefly terrestrial leaves, twigs, and wood entering streams from the riparian zone.
Didymosphenia geminata
Didymosphenia geminata, commonly called didymo or rock snot, is a freshwater diatom native to northern Europe and North America that forms dense streambed mats in nutrient-poor rivers worldwide since the 1990s.
Drift (stream ecology)
Drift in stream ecology is the downstream transport of benthic invertebrates in the water column, a primary food source for stream fishes and a means of dispersal.
Ecosystem respiration
Ecosystem respiration is the oxidation of organic matter to inorganic carbon by all organisms in an ecosystem, measured in streams and rivers from daily dissolved oxygen records.
Epilithon
Epilithon is the community of algae, bacteria, fungi, and protozoa that grows attached to rocks and stones in streams and lakes, forming the familiar slimy biofilm.
Fine particulate organic matter
Fine particulate organic matter (FPOM) is the organic fraction of particles between 0.45 and 1000 μm in streams and rivers, and a key food for collector invertebrates.
Flow
Environmental flow (e-flow): the quantity, timing, and quality of river flows needed to sustain freshwater ecosystems alongside human use; assessed by hydrological, habitat-simulation, and holistic methods such as Tennant, BBM, and DRIFT.
Flow duration curve
A flow duration curve (FDC) is a cumulative frequency curve showing the percentage of time specified stream discharges were equaled or exceeded, widely used in hydrology since about 1915.
Functional feeding group
A functional feeding group (FFG) is a classification of aquatic macroinvertebrates by their food-acquisition mechanism rather than taxonomy, proposed by Kenneth W. Cummins in 1973 with groups including shredders, collectors, scrapers, and predators.
Gammarus
Gammarus is a genus of amphipod crustaceans, mostly freshwater and brackish-water scavengers that shred leaf litter in streams, widely used as sentinel organisms in aquatic ecotoxicology.
Large woody debris
Large woody debris (LWD), now often called large wood, is logs, root wads, and branches in stream channels large enough to resist immediate transport by the flow.
Lateral connectivity
Lateral connectivity is the water-mediated exchange of water, energy, materials, and organisms between a river channel and its floodplain, one of three dimensions of river connectivity.
Leaf litter breakdown
Leaf litter breakdown is the decomposition of dead leaves in streams and rivers through leaching, microbial conditioning, and fragmentation, a key energy source for aquatic food webs.
Nutrient spiraling
Nutrient spiraling is the cycling of nutrients in streams and rivers, where uptake and mineralization combine with downstream transport to trace a spiral path, formalized in 1981.
Residual amount of water
Residual amount of water (residual flow): the flow left in a river below a dam or water take to sustain ecosystems, also called minimum, instream, or environmental flow; key in hydropower reduced flow stretches like Belo Monte.
River continuum concept
The river continuum concept (RCC) is a 1980 theory in stream ecology holding that rivers show a continuous gradient of conditions from headwaters to mouth, producing predictable changes in communities.
Stream metabolism
Stream metabolism is the combined rate of organic-carbon production and consumption in a stream, measured as gross primary production, ecosystem respiration, and net ecosystem production.
Thermal regime
A thermal regime, in stream ecology, is the characteristic pattern of water temperature in a river or stream through time, described by magnitude, variability, frequency, duration, and timing of temperatures.
Trophic cascade
A trophic cascade is an indirect interaction in which a top predator's effects propagate down a food web to herbivores and plants, introduced by ecologist Robert Paine.