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חברי כבוד של החברה הגיאולוגית
חברי כבוד של החברה הגיאולוגית
חברי כבוד של החברה הגיאולוגית
Increasing river migration and river-related forest removal in the Amazon Basin
Dente E. (1,2), Gardner J. (1,3), Langhorst T. (3), Yang X. (4), Abad J. D. (5), Armon M. (6,7), and Pavelsky T. (3)
(1) Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Haifa, Mt. Carmel, Haifa 3498838
(5) 1 Department of Geology and Environmental Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
2 School of Environmental Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
3 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
4 Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA
5 RED YAKU, Lima, Peru
6 The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
7 ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Rivers are constantly shifting their paths and changing the shape of floodplains through both gradual and episodic migration. These changes in river position interact with ecological systems and human activity, and shape Earth’s landscape. River migration rates are transient as a function of various environmental factors and are found to respond locally to human-induced land use and hydrological modifications. However, the macro-scale change in migration rates and its potential impact on floodplain vegetation is poorly understood. Here, based on satellite-derived observations encompassing 190,000 kilometers of rivers in the Amazon basin over several decades, we show a significant increasing trend in annual river migration rates and a fourfold rise in floodplain forest cover that has been removed by river migration and flooding. We suggest that these trends could be impacted by the extensive deforestation in the Amazon basin. The observed intensifying river-floodplain forest interactions could have broad, direct, and long-term impacts on river ecosystems and communities, landscape evolution, and the carbon cycle.