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  • Review Article
  • Published:

The impact of vegetation on meandering rivers

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 3, pages 165–178 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

The Palaeozoic evolution of land plants revolutionized river geomorphology. However, the relationships between biotic forcing and channel dynamics are still debated and, as such, the impacts of anthropogenic stressors such as climate change, reduced biodiversity and aridification on modern meandering rivers and their biogeochemical fluxes remain poorly understood. In this Review, we propose a unifying framework based on field and modelling data that describes the stability and dynamics of meandering rivers in both the presence and the absence of land plants. Based on evidence from the pre-vegetation rock record and from modern systems, we emphasize that meandering streams can indeed arise in the absence of land plants. However, plant evolution provided widespread settings suitable for stable meandering systems through retention of floodplain mud, sediment baffling and mechanical strengthening of channel banks. Altogether, these processes slowed the characteristic rates of meander growth and floodplain-soil reworking by up to an order of magnitude. Continued anthropogenic removal of riparian and watershed vegetation due to increased urbanization, deforestation, aridification and pollution could revert streams to pre-vegetation functioning, thereby increasing their channel and sediment mobility. Future research can use this framework to constrain the pace of ancient landscape processes on Earth and Mars, in addition to modern terrestrial rivers impacted by humans.

Key points

  • Reassessment of the pre-vegetation rock record and novel investigations of modern desert streams reveal that meandering rivers can be naturally stable in the absence of vegetation.

  • Notwithstanding the above, the rock record provides compelling evidence that the evolution of land vegetation provided a template for the stability of meandering rivers across a wider variety of landscapes.

  • The analysis of channel and sediment mobility in meandering rivers is key to understanding watershed-scale biogeochemistry, particularly in relation to weathering processes and floodplain carbon stocks and fluxes.

  • Integrating data sets from the rock record, numerical models and modern channel morphometry and hydrology is key to disclosing tighter links between biological and physical processes in alluvial plains.

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Fig. 1: A brief history of Earth’s rivers.
Fig. 2: Evolution of land plants.
Fig. 3: Stability fields for river planforms.
Fig. 4: Meandering rivers in barren and vegetated landscapes.

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Acknowledgements

A.I. is sponsored by a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Resource Council of Canada. The authors acknowledge W. J. McMahon for his comments on an early draft of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cooperative Freshwater Ecology Unit, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, Canada

    Alessandro Ielpi

  2. Harquail School of Earth Sciences, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, Canada

    Alessandro Ielpi

  3. Department of Geological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Mathieu G. A. Lapôtre & C. Kevin Boyce

  4. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

    Martin R. Gibling

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A.I. led the conceptualization, data curation, writing and figure drafting; M.G.A.L., M.R.G. and C.K.B. supported, in equal parts, the conceptualization, data curation, writing and figure drafting.

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Ielpi, A., Lapôtre, M.G.A., Gibling, M.R. et al. The impact of vegetation on meandering rivers. Nat Rev Earth Environ 3, 165–178 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-021-00249-6

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