Peter Downs

There is a long-standing interest in the influence of human activities on the morphological evolution of river channels in the historical period. Such understanding allows society to make informed choices about the potential environmental impacts of land use changes and water resource management actions and to improve the sustainability of river management. The impacts are highly complex because human actions and fluvial system responses are constantly evolving to create an ever-shifting environmental context that requires management approaches vary between locations. Considerable improvements to understanding could be achieved using a causally-based, integrative approach to fluvial geomorphology in the historical period.

Researchers have recently begun to reconstruct river channel evolution in response to multiple natural and human causal factors. Studies require data sets of high spatial and temporal resolution and are generally constrained by limits on robust historical data. Such approaches potentially define a new focal time-scale for fluvial geomorphology that sits between traditional short-term analyses of spatial processes and Holocene time-framed reconstruction of past environments spatial analyses of annual-scale processes and environmental reconstruction over Holocene time periods. While a historically-themed fluvial geomorphology has precedents, recent studies are distinct in their integral inclusion of human actions and so potentially define a methodologically distinctive fluvial geomorphology of the Anthropocene. Initial reviews of this nascent sub-discipline illustrate that studies rely largely on temporal synchronicity and spatial proximity to establish cause and effect. Conversely, our conceptual understanding of fluvial systems suggests a reach-differentiated sensitivity of river channels to change in terms of the likelihood, location, persistence and relative magnitude of response relative to alterations in the drivers for change.

This project aims to address these inadequacies by (i) synthesizing existing knowledge, (ii) developing a better analytical basis for such studies, and (iii) building a common vision for potential methods and applications. The central goal of this proposed research is to create an improved analytical basis for Anthropocene fluvial geomorphology based on combining earlier experiences utilising additional analytical expertise, and by building consensus using an international network of "early adopters".