About this Research Topic

Background

River and watershed restoration is an increasing environmental challenge, due to the increasing anthropogenic pressures that are degrading water quality and aquatic ecosystems worldwide. Our human technical and engineering capacity increased dramatically over the last century, allowing us to manipulate rivers to meet demands for regulated waterways, electricity generation, and human safety. As a consequence, rivers have become strongly regulated and damaged, freshwater biodiversity is declining and vital ecosystem services are lost. Watersheds and rivers are highly affected by these human actions and disturbances, having more negative consequences than were ever anticipated.

Unfortunately, human activities have impacted watersheds worldwide, meaning countless rivers are polluted and regulated, and many coastal areas have degraded habitat or reduced fisheries. The altered flow regimes of almost all world rivers constrain the restoration of riparian and estuarine habitats that rely on annual flood cycles and other aspects of natural flow regimes. Man-made dams which can cause these alterations are considered permanent landscape features, however, dams should not be considered immutable constraints, as exemplified by successful dam removals that have been occurring as part of restoration actions around the world. One of the worst socio-environmental disasters that marks the current history, occurred in November 2015 in Brazil. This involved an iron mining tailings dam rupture that resulted in the contamination of water, soil, and sediments along the 600 km of the entire course of the Doce River. The subsequent rupture of a second iron mining tailings dam at the neighboring watershed of the Paraopeba River, four years later, is considered the largest work accident in Brazil so far. This reveals the urgency, high risk, and lack of effective measures to avoid such disasters. Unfortunately, these events are not restricted to Brazil but have been occurring worldwide. Examples include the dam rupture of Banqiao e Shimatan, in 1975 in China, or the Machchu-2 dam rupture in India, in 1979, and the Stava River in Italy, in 1985. Dam ruptures are only one of several consequences of anthropic intervention that have strong impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human populations.

This Research Topic aims to consolidate cutting-edge, international research on river and watershed restoration, rehabilitation, and conservation, highlighting critical gaps in understanding and setting urgent priorities for research and action. The aim is to provide an international platform for generating an integrated, systems perspective on these complex, multidimensional, and socially constructed environmental hazards.

This is an open call to the environmental restoration community, for papers that reflect international expertise and diversity in responding to these significant global hazards. This collection will collate and synthesize novel understanding and insights from worldwide research on the re-establishment of pre-disturbed aquatic functions and related physical, chemical, and biological characteristics where feasible and beneficial.

Manuscripts focusing on, but not limited to, one or more of the following or related themes are particularly welcome:
• Current and future challenges and perspectives on river and watershed restoration, rehabilitation, and conservation.
• Current policy and regulatory frameworks, relating to degraded water quality, dam removal, less damaging management of hydropower facilities, physical habitat restoration, riparian replanting and reorganization of land use, and their impacts on some or all of society, environment, and economy.
• Approaches to water river quality monitoring and the assessment and monitoring of ecological health.
• Perceptions and social understanding of environmental disasters, along with case-study-based learning from a specific event.
• Use of state-of-the-art knowledge and methods for dealing with uncertainty, i.e. predictive frameworks and models as scientific tools in planning the repair of damaged ecosystems.
• Studies that encompass bodies of ecological knowledge pivotal to successful river restoration: system dynamics, scale and context-dependency, biodiversity, and ecosystem processes.
• Treatment of fisheries “restoration” considering principles of harvest management and stock assessment to support fishery and ecosystem restoration.
• Interactions of physical processes (hydrological and geomorphic) with ecological processes
• Land use and land cover change: impacts and restoration efforts to address changing flood characteristics, managing sediment delivery, altering riparian vegetation, and managing channel integrity.

Keywords: riparian and aquatic habitats, reestablishment of pre-disturbance conditions, hydropower impacts and river rehabilitation, river habitat and flow restoration, recovery of fisheries, restoration policy and regulation, restoration of watershed, ecosystem restoration

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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