Resilient floodplains in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Floodplain ecosystems have been drastically altered, and management activities aim to restore or improve floodplain functions or ecosystem services. Often these activities try to restore prealteration floodplain functions, but these efforts will likely fail without consideration of current conditions and variables driving floodplain processes. It is still unclear how we recognise when floodplain systems have been altered so they no longer provide the same prealteration functions and feedbacks even when historical drivers are restored, and what the implications are for floodplain management and restoration. Approaching river-floodplain management and restoration using a resilience framework, which focuses on recognising the importance of functional diversity and system trajectories of floodplain processes, is necessary to both understand the limitations of current management practices and to maximise the success of efforts to create healthy floodplain ecosystems. In this chapter, we provide an overview of floodplain management and restoration in the context of a resilience framework. Using that resilience framework, we highlight the importance of functional diversity and understanding systems trajectories in both evaluating current management practices and improving future efforts to restore healthy floodplains. Our goals for this chapter are to (1) describe how floodplains are resilient social-ecological systems that can be made more or less resilient by human activities" (2) demonstrate a variety of floodplain SESs altered by human activities" and (3) discuss conceptual and practical implications of viewing floodplains through a resilience framework.