Jonathan M Friedman, PhD (Former Employee)

Bottomland plant communities are typically dominated by the effects of floods. Floods create the surfaces on which plants become established, transport seeds and nutrients, and remove establish plants. Floods provide a moisture subsidy that allows development of bottomland forests in arid regions and produce anoxic soils, which can control bottomland plant distribution in humid regions...

Over the past 30 years, ecologists have demostrated the importance of flow and temperature as primary variables in driving running water, riparian and floodplain ecosystems. As it is important to assess the size and timing of discharge variations in relation to those in temperature, a method is proposed that uses multivariate techniques to separately classify annual discharge and...

To explore how high flows limit the streamward extent of riparian vegetation we quantified the effects of sediment mobilization and extended inundation on box elder (Acer negundo) saplings along the cobble-bed Gunnison River in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument, Colorado, USA. We counted and aged box elders in 144 plots of 37.2 m2, and combined a hydraulic model with the...

The response of rivers and riparian forests to upstream dams shows a regional pattern related to physiographic and climatic factors that influence channel geometry. We carried out a spatial analysis of the response of channel geometry to 35 dams in the Great Plains and Central Lowlands, USA. The principal response of a braided channel to an upstream dam is channel-narrowing, and the...

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No abstract available.

Flow variability plays a central role in structuring the physical environment of riverine ecosystems. However, natural variability in flows along many rivers has been modified by water management activities. We quantified the relationship between flow and establishment of the dominant tree (plains cottonwood, Populus deltoides subsp. monilifera) along one of the least hydrologically...

Plot sampling and hydraulic modeling were combined to investigate establishment and survival of plains cottonwood along Boulder Creek, an urban stream on the Colorado Plains. We tested the hypothesis that establishment is limited to bare, moist surfaces produced by spring flooding in the current year. No cottonwood germination was observed in 1989 when peak flow was low. A moderate peak...

No abstract available.

Streams in the plains of eastern Colorado are prone to intense floods following summer thunderstorms. Here, and in other semiarid and arid regions, channel recovery after a flood may take several decades. As a result, flood history strongly influences spatial and temporal variability in bottomland vegetation. Interpretation of these patterns must be based on understanding the long—term...

No abstract available.

A catastrophic flood in 1965 on Plum Creek, a perennial sandbed stream in the western Great Plains, removed most of the bottomland vegetation and transformed the single-thalweg stream into a wider, braided channel. Following eight years of further widening associated with minor high flows, a process of channel narrowing began in 1973; narrowing continues today. The history of channel...