1.3.1 Understanding Rivers as Personas: Rivers as Natural Systems
Course subject(s)
Module 1. River as ‘Persona’
In the previous section, we discussed the river Vjosa in Albania one of the last remaining natural rivers in Europe.
In the following lecture, we go into how rivers develop over time and how they behave as natural systems. For this, we refer to the scientific disciplines of hydrology and hydraulics, morphology and ecology. We do so in order to better understand a river like the Vjosa and – more in general – to understand how landscapes shape rivers and rivers shape landscapes.
As this MOOC is about Room for the River our focus is obviously also on the spatial dimension; but that dimension, in turn, relies on the fact that rivers are systems governed by so many feedbacks that they seem to have a will of their own. Almost like a person! So maybe we should ask: what would the river itself actually want? In the following weblecture, professor Klijn will teach you about the wants and needs of rivers. One of the things that rivers do is: meandering.
In the following lecture, humans enter the stage and, with the Dutch Rhine River as running example, it is shown how rivers respond to human interventions.
As can be seen in the video, humans and rivers are interlinked and affect each other. One of the relations is the levee effect.
Now that we have seen the weblecture, the gained understanding of riverine ecosystems can help us analyse other rivers as well.
Room for Rivers: Perspectives on River Basin Management by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://online-learning.tudelft.nl/courses/room-for-rivers-perspectives-on-river-basin-management/.