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Ecohydraulics is the study of the mechanisms that explain hierarchically nested aquatic and riparian biotic phenomena. Mechanisms are sequential actions that can be physical, biological, or an interaction between the two. Biotic phenomena consist of individual, population, and community-level conditions, behaviors, and interactions. Hierarchical nesting means that phenomena are present across a wide range of spatial scales: from the smallest fluid continuum scale to the scale of the entire Earth. Many ecohydraulic studies prominently address scaling. Under this definitional framework and given the widespread occurrence of water on Earth, ecohydraulics is the “proximal” science mediating the influence of “distal” landscape drivers (e.g., climate, geology, and topography). Historically, scientists discovered empirical correlations relating biotic conditions to both proximal and distal abiotic variables. However, when such results are applied to practical societal problems (e.g., stream barrier passage, habitat rehabilitation, and flow regime specification), the accuracy and specificity is insufficient to solve them. That has led to widespread recognition of the need for a mechanistic understanding culminating in predictive numerical models. Driven by such necessity, physical and biological scientists and engineers have formed multidisciplinary teams to work out how water and biota interact. Through its marriage of conceptual understanding with quantitative analysis, ecohydraulics is playing a central role in methodological advancements to objectively, transparently, and repeatably explain biotic phenomena at multiple spatial scales. Students involved in ecohydraulics are part of an emerging interdisciplinary generation identifying more with problem-oriented applied science that responds to societal needs to solve specific ecological problems than disciplinarians driven by curiosity and traditional socio-scientific pathways. Nevertheless, it goes too far to conclude that ecohydraulics is nothing more than the application of other sciences, with no basic developments of its own. Necessity often motivates ecohydraulicists to undertake novel experiments revealing fundamental discoveries. As a result, a reasonable distinction can be made between basic ecohydraulics for studying natural phenomena and applied ecohydraulics for rehabilitating degraded phenomena. This annotated bibliography is the first of two spanning ecohydraulics, and it tackles the former, while the second addresses the latter. Due to space limitations, this article is narrowed to natural fluvial ecohydraulics. Within this domain, there are five essential topics: environmental fluid mechanics, flora ecohydraulics, fluvial habitat, faunal ecohydraulics, and fish migration. Finally, space limitations further limit the scope to an emphasis on observational studies over numerical modeling. |
