UC Berkeley

Since the industrial revolution, human impacts on landscapes and river systems globally have intensified significantly. Humans nowadays artificially increase and decrease fluxes of water, sediment and nutrients on a scale far exceeding natural fluxes. Rivers integrate such changes occurring throughout their drainage basins, and thus can be considered as indicators of landscape processes and river basin "health" more broadly. This special issue brings together a set of papers that explore interactions of climate change and river processes, influences of land use changes, effects of reservoirs, as well as new approaches to sorting out the relative importance of these diverse influences on rivers and uncertainties in modeling future behavior. These papers contribute to a growing body of work demonstrating the fundamental differences between large rivers in the Anthropocene and rivers in prior time periods. © 2014. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.