Revisiting Vegetation Gradient Analysis and the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis for the Interpretation of Riverine Geomorphic Patterns

Tommaso Sitzia (), Simone Iacopino, Edoardo Alterio, Francesco Comiti, Nicola Surian, Luca Mao, Mario Aristide Lenzi, Thomas Campagnaro and Lorenzo Picco
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Tommaso Sitzia: Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry, Università degli Studi di Padova, Viale dell’Università 16, 35020 Legnaro, Italy
Simone Iacopino: Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry, Università degli Studi di Padova, Viale dell’Università 16, 35020 Legnaro, Italy
Edoardo Alterio: Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry, Università degli Studi di Padova, Viale dell’Università 16, 35020 Legnaro, Italy
Francesco Comiti: Faculty of Science and Technology, Free University of Bozen, Universitätsplatz 5, 39100 Bolzano, Italy
Nicola Surian: Department of Geosciences, Università degli Studi di Padova, Via Gradenigo, 6, 35131 Padova, Italy
Luca Mao: Department of Geography, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool, Lincoln LN6 7TS, UK
Mario Aristide Lenzi: Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry, Università degli Studi di Padova, Viale dell’Università 16, 35020 Legnaro, Italy
Thomas Campagnaro: Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry, Università degli Studi di Padova, Viale dell’Università 16, 35020 Legnaro, Italy
Lorenzo Picco: Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry, Università degli Studi di Padova, Viale dell’Università 16, 35020 Legnaro, Italy

Land, 2023, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-15

Abstract: Human effects on the water economy of the river systems are currently well documented at the worldwide scale, impacting a range of ecosystem services. In this perspective article, we discuss the findings of recent papers that under different intensities of human disturbance have coupled the analyses of riverine geomorphological and plant community patterns. The discussion is carried out within the historical framework of past and current methods of sampling and analysing the river geomorphology and the plant communities along cross-sectional profiles. The research has been conducted along three major gravel-bed rivers of the south-eastern Italian Alps: Brenta, Piave, and Tagliamento. The collated and summarised results here demonstrate the existence of a strong relationship between the woody species variance that can be explained by geomorphologic patterns and human disturbance intensity. The less disturbed river has an intermediate value of species variance that can be explained by geomorphology, the intermediate-disturbed river has the highest value, and the highly disturbed river has the lowest value. Then, we proposed an interpretation key and an adaptation of the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, which reads as: “in rivers, the greatest influence of geomorphic properties on vegetation occurs in the moderate or middle ranges of a human disturbance gradient”. We argue that the “influence of the geomorphic properties on vegetation” is assessed through the species constrained variance through an ordination analysis, such as that which is explained here. The most recent collection techniques based on field survey and remote sensing are making it increasingly easy and accurate to study of the trends of geomorphic and plant community variables throughout time and space. Thus, we encourage that researchers should check whether and how our observation is conserved through different groups of taxa and intensities of natural and human disturbance.

Keywords: geomorphological processes; riverine vegetation; human interference; intermediate disturbance hypothesis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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