Research Information System
The 8th World Congress of the International Association for Landscape Ecology "landscape ecology for sustainable environment and culture, Beijing, China, 1 - 04 August 2011, vol.1, pp.545, (Summary Text)
"Planning landscapes in river basins requires hydroecologic assessments. Examining them as ecosystems enables explaining the basics of how landscapes, watersheds, stream corridors, and streams function. Many common ecosystem functions involve movement of materials (e.g., sediment and debris), energy (e.g., sunlight and biomass), and organisms (e.g., movement of mammals, fish, and macro invertebrates) between the internal and external environments in relation with water cycle. As an example a stream ecosystem has an input/output relationship with the next higher scale, the stream corridor. This scale, in turn, interacts with the landscape scale, and so on up the hierarchy. The spatial structures (matrix, patch, corridor, mosaic) defined and used by landscape ecologists can fit into watershed scale properly. The zoning in watershed, drainage system, and hydrologic elements like floodplains, deltas, channel attributes would provide a more robust planning approach particularly when river corridors are on the table. In this perspective we imported hydroecologic attributes into planning procedure at a case study in Riva basin with the objective of combining natural and cultural elements to build up a planning framework. Riva river basin lies at the outskirts of Istanbul as a portion of larger Marmara Basin. The landscape around the creek is gaining importance as the city sprawls. The landscape subject to our assessment is composed of an alluvial floodplain and the hill slopes surrounding it to compose the basin. The risks based on human activities have been grouped into 3 categories; a) water pollution, b) erosion and sedimentation, and c) torrents and floods. The basin has been divided into sub-watersheds and they have been scored for these 3 categories. The landscape potential evaluation has been based on the risk potential of sub-watersheds. The risk potentials of watersheds have been verified with field surveys. The field surveys were composed of measurements of water quality, riparian ecosystem condition (integrity, health, and functionality), and human impacts (roads, bridges, land use, trampling, grazing, etc.). With this approach we had the opportunity to verify our assessment in the field. The results of the study suggest that hydroecological evaluations should form the background of landscape assessments in riverine environments as almost 60 percent of the watershed was prone to torrent and flood risk while 27.7 percent had a risk of erosion in medium to severe levels in Riva Creek case.