Floods and Floodplains- ResourcesFloodplains provide many benefits to people and nature. They store floodwaters, allowing groundwater aquifers to recharge and natural water purification processes to function. In Asia, the fishery of the Mekong River - which feeds 55 million people - relies on yearly inundations of its floodplain to sustain this massive freshwater food source.
Floodplains link, and play a central role in maintaining the health of, rivers, lakes, wetlands and estuaries. When managed properly, floodplains can provide for agriculture, grazing, and the harvesting of timber and fiber. Butin order to function properly, floodplains must be periodically flooded.
The Nature Conservancy is working with partners to integrate water and floodplain management by:
- Reconnecting rivers with their floodplains: Allowing periodic flooding of floodplains leads to healthier rivers, lands, and estuaries. Increasingly, techniques are being used to manage flood risks more effectively than rigid use of dams and levees. These techniques include setting levees back from river banks, changing the characteristics of buildings and roads, and protecting floodplain lands through purchase or easements. Examples of relevant projects include the Conservancy's work on the Yangtze River in China and the Mississippi River in the US.
- Ensuring natural patterns of water flow:Environmental flows are necessary to maintain the health of rivers, floodplains, and estuaries, and need to include low flows and sometimes periodic floods. Examples of partners include the US Army Corps of Engineers, the national electric energy utility of Honduras, and others.
- Advancing innovative policies and practices to catalyze extensive river-floodplain restoration for nature and people: Innovations in policies that govern water and land management are needed to enable river-floodplain restoration across large geographical scales and to ensure that the full benefits of a functioning floodplain can be realized by society.
Tools and Resources
Technologies including the Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration (IHA) software, flow restoration database and the Regime Prescription Tool (RPT) to aide freshwater practitioners can be found by clicking here.
Journal Articles about Freshwater Conservation
Suggested articles for Floodplain Practitioners:
Kendy, E. & Bredeheoft, J.D. (2007) "Mitigating the Ecological Effects of Riverbank Filtration." Journal American Water Works Association, December 2007, 26-27.
(Reprinted from Journal AWWA, Vol. 99, No. 12 (December 2007), by permission. Copyright © 2007, American Water Works Association. )
Arthington, A.H., Bunn, S.E., Poff, N.L., and R.J. Naiman. 2006. The Challanege of Providing Environmental Flow Rules to Sustain River Ecosysytems. Ecological Applications 16(4):1311-1318.
Richter, B.D., Warner, Andrew T., Meyer, Judy L., and Lutz, Kim. 2006. A Collaborative and Adaptive Process for Developing Environmental Flow Recommendations. (.pdf, 558 kb)
Richter, B.D. and H.E. Richter. 2000. Prescribing flood regimes to sustain riparian ecosystems along meandering rivers. Conservation Biology 14:1467-1478.
View the paper (.pdf, 1.1 MB)
(This paper is posted with the permission of Blackwell Publishing.)
Please contact Diedre Paterno Pai: dpaterno-pai@tnc.org with any questions, comments or suggestions