New research shows how much wood is flowing to coastal regions to estimate the magnitude of global wood movement. Emily Iskin is a student at Colorado State University.
Ellen has always been fascinated by the deep sea. She studies the interaction between rivers and water, the flow of wood and the landforms created as a result.
The first pictures of organisms were found in the deep sea in the 1970s, according to a Colorado State University professor.
Her interest in the sea and how organisms on pieces of wood that sink to the ocean floor create these communities led to a new area of research for the fluvial geomorphologist. Humans have interrupted the cascade of wood that used to end up in the oceans.
The study was published in Science Advances.
To estimate the magnitude of global wood movement, Wohl and Emily Iskin, a PhD student in the Department of Geosciences in the Warner College of Natural Resources, collaborated. They looked at data from the United States, Canada, France, Russia, Serbia and other countries.
The maximum estimate of large wood entering the ocean each year is approximately 166 million cubic feet, because of wood removal from rivers and the minimum estimate of historical wood movement due to river engineering.
Reducing the movements of wood is bad for coastal and marine environments.
The researchers hope to bring attention to a problem that many people don't know about, that disrupting the cascade of wood from waterways can have consequences for marine environments.
We have been altering the wood cascade for more than a century.
It is important for a variety of plants and animals, as well as helping with the movement of sand, that Driftwood is removed from some coastal areas, such as tourist beaches in the Mediterranean.
"It's like a sunken coral reef when driftwood sinks," said Wohl. The wood is used as a refuge by living creatures.
Everything is connected.
The way humans interact with wood is different than the way forests were before we existed, according to the master's thesis of Iskin.
She said that small scale human impacts, such as removing wood from a river, draining a floodplain and logging a hillslope, affect the entire river corridor at a much broader scale. Everything is connected. The benefits of logjams in a river are not only beneficial to the local environment, but also provide benefits downstream to the open ocean.
Iskin said that the human impacts aren't inherently good or bad, but they will change the river systems.
She said that sometimes they can anticipate the effects and sometimes they can't. The rivers are going to change.
In the future, scientists might use radio tracking devices on logs and wood.
She said you could watch the circulation patterns of the ocean.
The analysis will hopefully spur efforts to measure wood flux to the oceans from the remaining large rivers in North America and the tropics.
She said it would be great if we could get more studies about what's coming into the ocean.
Ellen Wohl and her team Damming the wood falls in Science Advances. Science.org has a DOI of/10.1126/sciadv.abj0988.
Science Advances has journal information.
The news about disrupting wood from rivers to oceans was retrieved fromphys.org on December 10, 2011.
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