The Scientific Evolution of Ecohydrology

The principles of ecohydrology have evolved since the late 1990s in such publications, promoted
by UNESCO support, as: Zalewski (2000); Zalewski and Harper, (2002); Zalewski et al., (2004).
They have focused upon the links between the disciplines and the use of low-cost ecological
technologies for the management of wetland, instream and riparian plant communities. These
were first given the term Ecological Engineering (Mitsch and Jørgensen, 1989) and have now
become an integral part of ecohydrology, termed ‘phytotechnologies’. The linkage gained
support from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in recognition of
phytotechnologies’ widespread global value as a lowcost sustainable solution to mitigating
pollution on land and water (Zalewski, 2002; Zalewski et al., 2003; Zalewski, 2004). The range
of techniques that can be enhanced through ecological engineering to increase the ecosystem
services that river basins can provide is illustrated in Fig. 1.2 and 1.3. The scientific development
of ecohydrology can be traced to two major theories at different scales – that of the ‘ecosystem’
and that of ‘Gaia’. Both of them describe the emergent properties of groups of interacting living
organisms. Both have sought the analogy of a ‘super-organism’ to aid understanding.
The ecosystem
An ecosystem is a geographic area where plants, animals, and other organisms, as well as
weather and landscapes, work together to form a bubble of life. Ecosystems contain biotic or
living, parts, as well as abiotic factors, or nonliving parts. Biotic factors include plants, animals,
and other organisms. Abiotic factors include rocks, temperature, and humidity.The whole surface
of Earth is a series of connected ecosystems. Ecosystems are often connected in a larger biome.
Biomes are large sections of land, sea, or atmosphere. Forests, ponds, reefs, and tundra are all
types of biomes, for example. They’re organized very generally, based on the types of plants and
animals that live in them. Within each forest, each pond, each reef, or each section of tundra,
you’ll find many different ecosystems. The smaller scale and earlier concept, that of the
ecosystem, comes from a term coined by Arthur Tansley (1935) but reflecting 40 or so years of
earlier thinking about the linkage between biological systems and their environment. The
ecosystem was proposed as an alternative to the super-organism concepts of vegetation that had
been proposed by Clements (1916). The simile of a super-organism has been used repeatedly
during the 20th century to describe a group of organisms having the physiological properties of a
single organism (Lincoln et al.,1982). It has difficulties if it is used literally, because an
individual organism is the template for natural selection to operate upon; but it does have value if
used metaphorically to assist the understanding of a concept with emergent properties, such as
Ecosystem or River Basin.An important theory in support of the earliest thinking about
ecosystems, was the apparent homeostasis in lakes created by its feedback loops in, for example,
nutrient cycling. This can be traced back to the last few decades of the 19th century, when Forbes
(1887) envisaged a lake as a ‘microcosm’, where ‘a balance between building up and breaking
down [occurs], in which the struggle for existence and natural selection have produced an
equilibrium’. Ecosystem and super-organism concepts have now been incorporated into
ecological risk assessment guidelines, which developed in the United States during the early
1990s (USEPA, 1998). Even if several basic differences do exist, in many ways ecological risk
assessment is perceived as an extension of risk analysis methodologies developed to protect
human health. A super-organism analogy can be perceived in the definition of essential
ecosystem functions, ‘ecosystem physiology’, and in the environmental destiny of multiple
stressors being transferred between different matrices (air, water, soil, sediment) in a similar way
to substances transferred between the organs of a single organism. Risk-based thinking has
become a central tenet of modern environmental management (as in, for example the EU Water
Framework Directive) to which ecohydrology is contributing its vision of river basin unity and
its attention to habitat integrity. Ecosystem and super-organism concepts have now been
incorporated into ecological risk assessment guidelines, which developed in the United States
during the early 1990s (USEPA, 1998). Even if several basic differences do exist, in many ways
ecological risk assessment is perceived as an extension of risk analysis methodologies developed
to protect human health. A super-organism analogy can be perceived in the definition of essential
ecosystem functions, ‘ecosystem physiology’, and in the environmental destiny of multiple
stressors being transferred between different matrices (air, water, soil, sediment) in a similar way
to substances transferred between the organs of a single organism. Risk-based thinking has
become a central tenet of modern environmental management (as in, for example the EU Water
Framework Directive) to which ecohydrology is contributing its vision of river basin unity and
its attention to habitat integrity.
Gaia
The higher theory within which ecohydrology fi ts, is the Gaia theory of planetary self-
regulation. This, fi rst proposed by Lovelock (1972, 1979, 1988), explained that the homeostasis
of the Earth’s atmosphere was maintained by the negative feedback activities of the biosphere,
because it was far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The theory was at first heavily criticised for
three reasons, because:
Lovelock and Margulis (1974) had ignored much earlier scientifi c works putting forward the
idea of the infl uence of the biota on its environment (e.g. as early as Spencer 1844, Huxley
1877),
They did not fully foresee the homeostatic, teleonomic and optimising implications of their
theory (Kirchner 1989), and
The metaphor of the Earth (Gaia) seen as a living entity, which did not reproduce, was not
compatible with neo-Darwinism, even if the metaphor was illustrating the second law of
thermodynamics (Lotkla 1925; Schrödinger 1944).
Patten and Odum (1981) tackled the teleonomic epistemological gap to defend the view that
ecosystems are cybernetic systems (c.f. Margalef 1968, Odum and Odum 1971) and rejected the
idea of the super-organism, in response to Engelberg and Boyarsky (1979). Lovelock was
himself heavily criticized at the American Geophysical Union’s Annual Chapman Conference, in
March 1988, dedicated to Gaia (Kirchner 1989; Schneider & Boston 1991). His theory then had
to integrate the neo-Darwinist criticisms to survive and try to demonstrate that emergent
properties may arise from biota at the global level and regulate the atmosphere. This it did
(Watson and Lovelock 1983; Lenton 1998; Lenton and Lovelock, 2000).
The Role of Aquatic Sciences
Lake ecology had made major contributions to the development of ecological theory in the
early–mid-20th century, and running water ecology soon caught up. Thirty years ago, the
beginnings of understanding of the consequences of flow for riverine ecosystem structure
(Cummins, 1974), led to a major step forward in integrating physical and ecological processes in
running water (Vannote et al., 1980), the River Continuum Concept (RCC). This also made sense
of an earlier, more descriptive phase of aquatic ecology, river zonation, which had been based on
fi sh communities (Huet, 1954) and the typology of river stretches ,(Illies, 1961; Illies and
Botoseanu, 1963) summarized by Hynes (1970) and Hawkes (1975). The RCC did this by
integrating the physical driving forces from source to mouth with these biological zones in a
river:‘in natural river systems biological communities form a temporal continuum of
synchronized species replacements following the fl ow from the spring to the river
mouth’(Vannote et al., 1980) Some aspects of the continuum, particularly the spiralling
behaviour of nutrients in rivers, had already been suggested (Webster and Pattern, 1979) and
were elaborated shortly after the RCC (Newbold et al., 1983). Subsequently the RCC was
reshaped and extended to encompass broader spatial and temporal scales (Cummins et al., 1984;
Minshall et al., 1985). The role of woody debris in holding back river discharge (Triska, 1984)
and infl uencing fl oodplain structure on temporal scales for up to hundreds of years, was the
most important ecological regulatory process highlighted. This triggered further research and
many investigations have been devoted to this subject since then (Harmon et al., 1986; Gurnell et
al., 1999; Robertson and Augspurger, 1999). The RCC had not explicitly initially addressed
human impact, but the Serial Discontinuity Concept (SDC) by Ward and Stanford (1983) was a
way of understanding the magnitude of disruption, initially by dams. In larger rivers the infl
uence of the river fl oodplain on the main channel in the lower reaches was not fully included in
the RCC and as a result the Flood Pulse Concept (FPC), was formulated – initially for the largest
fl ood plain system of the world, the Amazon and its basin (Junk, 1982; Junk et al., 1989). More
recently, its ideas were extended to include temperate fl oodplains (Tockner et al.,2000).
Although fl ooding has major consequences for fl oodplain functioning and productivity at all
latitudes (Bayley, 1995; Zalewski, 2006), the fl ood pulse effect is particularly relevant in the
tropics due to temperature coupling, i.e. the seasonal convergence of high discharge and high
temperatures, which maximise biotic processes such as fi sh development and biomass
accumulation (Junk et al., 1989; Junk, 2000; Junk and Wantzen, 2003).
The Genesis of Ecohydrology
Ecohydrology was born in the UNESCO stable as part of the 5th IHP (International Hydrological
Programme, 1996-2001). This was in one sense a response to the formal statements arising from
the Dublin Conference on Water and promotion of Integrated Water Management (Solanes and
Gonzalez-Villarreal, 1999) but in another sense it represented the intellectual development of the
UNESCO Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme. MAB, launched in 1971, had quickly
realized the importance of human impact on aquatic systems, as it was reflected, among others,
in the Land Use Impacts on Aquatic Systems project of the MAB programme (Jolánkai and
Roberts, 1984). This importance was translated into a determination to understand the potential
role of sub-systems on buffering the worst effects of human impact, resulting in the 5-year MAB
programme Role of Land/Inland Water Ecotones in Landscape Management and Restoration
(Naiman et al., 1989; Naiman and Decamps 1990; Zalewski, et al.,2001). The final meeting of
the Ecotone project in 1994 concluded that an important development would be the integration of
ecology and other sciences, a natural development of earlier integrative initiatives within
UNESCO. Consequently, the lessons from the Ecotone project, which had emphasized ecological
issues, became incorporated into the needs of the new IHP-V project, which saw the close
cooperation between freshwater ecology, geomorphology, hydrology and water engineering as a
central component to make ecohydrology the holistic ‘tool for the sustainable management of
aquatic resources’ (Zalewski et al., 1997) that is the subject of this book. Throughout this period,
key staff members of the UNESCO IHP programme had the vision and the intellect to drive the
evolution of the concept forward, by providing support for conferences, meetings and subsequent
publications.Development of integrated thinking about water resources occurred concurrently
with the recognition of the importance of the meaning of ‘sustainability’ before and after the
1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, known as the
‘Rio Convention’) (Membratu, 1998). Although recognition of our general environmental
deterioration had started before Rio – it can be traced back to varied sources such as ‘Silent
Spring’ by Rachel Carson in 1963 and the 1972 Stockholm Conference (Meadows et al.,1992) –
the specific impact of this deterioration on water resource availability was highlighted by the
Dublin Conference on Water & the Environment early in 1992 that helped to prepare for
UNCED in Rio. Dublin was followed by the Paris conference, 6 years later – Water, a Looming
Crisis? (Zebidi, 1998). The community of aquatic scientists had also been moving along several
parallel routes towards an integrated approach to aquatic management, for a decade prior to the
first use of the term ecohydrology in this context. Academic conference titles since the early
1990s show this: for example Hydrological, Chemical and Biological Processes of Contaminant
Transformation and Transport in River and Lake Systems (Jolánkai, 1992), Habitat Hydraulics
(LeClerc et al., 1996), Hydro-ecology (Acreman, 2001), Environmental Flows for River Systems
(Petts, 2003), Aquatic Habitats: Analysis and Restoration (Garcia and Martinez, 2005). These
meetings and proceedings encouraged aquatic scientists to work with their neighbouring
disciplines. Proceedings showed the beginnings of integration of ecology with hydrology,
through ‘habitat hydraulics’ or ‘ecohydraulics’ or ‘environmental flows’ – the terms given to the
allocation of flows in rivers or releases from reservoirs for the maintenance of aquatic habitats
and life.

The Need for Ecohydrology

Every country in the world has problems with water allocation because there is too little, of the
right quality, in the right place. The government of every country in the world recognizes this,
though few are taking action, many recognize it but are taking limited action, and too many
recognize it but are doing nothing because the timescale of the solution exceeds the timescale of
government rule. UNESCO (the lead agency in science) and UNEP (the lead agency in the
environment), among the major inter-governmental organizations addressing environmental
issues, had recognized the problems of water scarcity and allocation in their support for the
ecohydrological approach. Implicit in this support is the recognition that past Water management
approaches are no longer appropriate or effective for the 21st century, and new approaches are
needed. Former water management consisted of capital-intensive, high-technology, Engineering-
based schemes (collectively known as ‘hydro-technology’). Construction of dams, water
diversion, flood relief, agricultural development implying drainage and irrigation, and sewage
treatment schemes all fit this description. The schemes almost always tried to control, or at best
to exploit, the natural elements of the water cycles rather than work with them. They almost
always resulted in more widespread and unpredicted deterioration of the natural components of
the water cycle. Individually-small perturbations can be seen almost everywhere on the globe;
for example on a very small scale, the eutrophication of Esthwaite Water in the English Lake
District was begun by the construction of the sewage treatment works in the village of
Hawkshead, when a piped water supply was fi rst laid into the village in 1923 and fl ush toilets
replaced earth closets (Pennington, 1981). Individually-large and catastrophic examples are not
so ubiquitous and not so obvious to the ’ordinary person’, implying that such mistakes continue
to be repeated; for example the damming of rivers in Africa or the salinization and drying up of
the Aral Sea in Central Asia (shared by Uzbekistan and Kashakstan) through the diversion of
Amu Darya and Syr Darya tributaries to help grow cotton. The Aral Sea has shrunk by more than
half of its surface (68,329 km2) and by 75 per cent of its volume after 90 per cent of the natural
inflows were diverted to irrigate massive cotton monocultures, originally extending for more
than 7 million ha in the USSR (Kindler and Matthews, 1997; SIWI, 2001).