Fire and flood expand the floodplain shifting habitat mosaic concept

• DOI: 10.1086/684016
• Publication Date: 2015-09-23T18:25:41Z
• Authors: W. J. Kleindl; M. C. Rains; L. A. Marshall; F. R. Hauer
• Keywords: assessment; mantel; 910; 15. Life on land; 01 natural sciences; 333; 6. Clean water; network theory; ecosystem dynamics; remote sensing; 13. Climate action; Earth Sciences; path analysis; floodplain habitat; alluvial graphs; 0105 earth and related environmental sciences

The floodplain shifting habitat mosaic concept suggests that habitat patch dynamics are influenced by hydrologic disturbances driven by flood pulses of sufficient power to initiate incipient motion of the substratum and maintain cut-and-fill alluviation of the channel and banks. However, floodplain habitat mosaics are subject to other important landscape-scale disturbance regimes. In the Rocky Mountains of the USA and Canada, fire also affects floodplain habitat patch composition. The floodplain exists at the intersection of disturbance regimes that shape the riverscape and those that shape the landscape. We extended the shifting habitat mosaic concept by examining the effects of multiple disturbance elements on habitat patch composition across the aquatic–terrestrial ecotone of the North Fork of the Flathead River, a free-flowing river in southeastern British Columbia, Canada, and northwestern Montana, USA. We used remotely sensed imagery, meteorological records, empirical and modeled rainfall-runoff dat...