Urban areas are hot spots that drive environmental change at multiple scales. Material demands of production and human consumption alter land use and cover, biodiversity, and hydrosystems locally to regionally, and urban waste discharge affects local to global biogeochemical cycles and climate. For urbanites, however, global environmental changes are swamped by dramatic changes in the local environment. Urban ecology integrates natural and social sciences to study these radically altered local environments and their regional and global effects. Cities themselves present both the problems and solutions to sustainability challenges of an increasingly urbanized world.

http://leml.asu.edu/jingle/web_pages/wu_pubs/pdf_files/grimm_etal-2008-gc+ecology of cities.pdf

Global Change and the Ecology of Cities

Recognition of the escalating hydrological alteration of rivers on a global scale and resultant environmental degradation, has led to the establishment of the science of environmental flow assessment whereby the quantity and quality of water required for ecosystem conservation and resource protection are determined.

A global review of the present status of environmental flow methodologies revealed the existence of some 207 individual methodologies, recorded for 44 countries within six world regions. These could be differentiated into hydrological, hydraulic rating, habitat simulation and holistic methodologies, with a further two categories representing combination-type and other approaches.

Although historically, the United States has been at the forefront of the development and application of methodologies for prescribing environmental flows, using 37% of the global pool of techniques, parallel initiatives in other parts of the world have increasingly provided the impetus for significant advances in the field.

Application of methodologies is typically at two or more levels. (1) Reconnaissance-level initiatives relying on hydrological methodologies are the largest group (30% of the global total), applied in all world regions. Commonly, a modified Tennant method or arbitrary low flow indices is adopted, but efforts to enhance the ecological relevance and transferability of techniques across different regions and river types are underway. (2) At more comprehensive scales of assessment, two avenues of application of methodologies exist. In developed countries of the northern hemisphere, particularly, the instream flow incremental methodology (IFIM) or other similarly structured approaches are used. As a group, these methodologies are the second most widely applied worldwide, with emphasis on complex, hydrodynamic habitat modelling. The establishment of holistic methodologies as 8% of the global total within a decade, marks an alternative route by which environmental flow assessment has advanced. Such methodologies, several of which are scenario-based, address the flow requirements of the entire riverine ecosystem, based on explicit links between changes in flow regime and the consequences for the biophysical environment. Recent advancements include the consideration of ecosystem-dependent livelihoods and a benchmarking process suitable for evaluating alternative water resource developments at basin scale, in relatively poorly known systems. Although centred in Australia and South Africa, holistic methodologies have stimulated considerable interest elsewhere. They may be especially appropriate in developing world regions, where environmental flow research is in its infancy and water allocations for ecosystems must, for the time being at least, be based on scant data, best professional judgement and risk assessment. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

http://www.swrcb.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/bay_delta/deltaflow/docs/exhibits/swrcb/swrcb_tharme2003.pdf

A global perspective on environmental flow assessment: emerging trends in the development and application of environmental flow methodologies for rivers

https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/jrnl/2011/nrs_2011_pickett_001.pdf

Urban ecological systems: Scientific foundations and a decade of progress

Urban green space is purported to offset greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, remove air and water pollutants, cool local climate, and improve public health. To use these services, municipalities have focused efforts on designing and implementing ecosystem-services-based “green infrastructure” in urban environments. In some cases the environmental benefits of this infrastructure have been well documented, but they are often unclear, unquantified, and/or outweighed by potential costs. Quantifying biogeochemical processes in urban green infrastructure can improve our understanding of urban ecosystem services and disservices (negative or unintended consequences) resulting from designed urban green spaces. Here we propose a framework to integrate biogeochemical processes into designing, implementing, and evaluating the net effectiveness of green infrastructure, and provide examples for GHG mitigation, stormwater runoff mitigation, and improvements in air quality and health.

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1890/090220

Coupling biogeochemical cycles in urban environments: ecosystem services, green solutions, and misconceptions

Understanding, management and modelling of urban hydrology and its consequences for receiving waters: A state of the art

The term ''urban stream syndrome'' describes the consistently observed ecological degra- dation of streams draining urban land. This paper reviews recent literature to describe symptoms of the syndrome, explores mechanisms driving the syndrome, and identifies appropriate goals and methods for ecological restoration of urban streams. Symptoms of the urban stream syndrome include a flashier hy- drograph, elevated concentrations of nutrients and contaminants, altered channel morphology, and reduced biotic richness, with increased dominance of tolerant species. More research is needed before generaliza- tions can be made about urban effects on stream ecosystem processes, but reduced nutrient uptake has been consistently reported. The mechanisms driving the syndrome are complex and interactive, but most impacts can be ascribed to a few major large-scale sources, primarily urban stormwater runoff delivered to streams by hydraulically efficient drainage systems. Other stressors, such as combined or sanitary sewer overflows, wastewater treatment plant effluents, and legacy pollutants (long-lived pollutants from earlier land uses) can obscure the effects of stormwater runoff. Most research on urban impacts to streams has concentrated on correlations between instream ecological metrics and total catchment imperviousness. Recent research shows that some of the variance in such relationships can be explained by the distance between the stream reach and urban land, or by the hydraulic efficiency of stormwater drainage. The mech- anisms behind such patterns require experimentation at the catchment scale to identify the best management approaches to conservation and restoration of streams in urban catchments. Remediation of stormwater impacts is most likely to be achieved through widespread application of innovative approaches to drainage design. Because humans dominate urban ecosystems, research on urban stream ecology will require a broadening of stream ecological research to integrate with social, behavioral, and economic research.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1899/04-028.1

The urban stream syndrome: current knowledge and the search for a cure

/pdf/environmental-flow-recommendations-for-the-goulburn-river-4pyw5exh0b.pdf

Environmental flow recommendations for the Goulburn River below Lake Eildon

/pdf/report-of-the-broken-river-scientific-panel-on-the-ffxx4zzu39.pdf

Report of the Broken River Scientific Panel on the environmental condition and flow in the Broken River and Broken Creek

/pdf/report-of-the-ovens-scientific-panel-on-the-environmental-14uuq0rk2o.pdf

Peter Cottingham

Papers

The urban stream syndrome: current knowledge and the search for a cure

Environmental flow recommendations for the Goulburn River below Lake Eildon

Report of the Broken River Scientific Panel on the environmental condition and flow in the Broken River and Broken Creek

Report of the Ovens Scientific Panel on the Environmental Condition and Flows of the Ovens River

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Habitat Reconstruction in Rivers