Impacts of Land-Use and Land-Cover Change on River Systems (original) (raw)

Human land-use activities have fundamentally changed the hydrogeomorphology of rivers. Since the late Holocene, anthropogenic changes to alluvial stratigraphy and channel morphology have often been greater than those left by climate change. This chapter reviews four general topics related to land use: (1) landscape sensitivity and scale; (2) changes to processes of flood generation, soil erosion, sediment sequestration, and sediment yields; (3) how accelerated water, erosion, and sediment deliveries transform fluvial systems; and (4) the long-term history of land-use change impacts following the Neolithic advent of agriculture and its spread. In covering these topics, the chapter introduces the newly emerging field of land-change science.