Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) aims to avoid forest conversion to alternative land-uses through financial incentives. Oil-palm has high opportunity costs, which according to current literature questions the financial competitiveness of REDD+ in tropical lowlands. To understand this more, we undertook regional fine-scale and coarse-scale analyses (through ca...

We report herein the first description of the physical structure of the aquatic habitats of the Lower Paraguay River along 390 km from Asunción city (Paraguay) to the confluence with the Paraná River. The hierarchical ordination of the Fluvial Hydrosystem Approach (FHA) allowed us to classify the Lower Paraguay as a meandering functional sector where five functional sets were identified: (a) ma...

Floodplain management is a subject in which everyone in the floodplain is a stakeholder. Real participation only takes place when stakeholders are part of the decision-making process. This can occur directly when local communities come together to make floodplain management choices or if democratically elected or otherwise accountable agencies or groups can represent stakeholders. Real particip...

With rapid flood extent mapping capabilities, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of river inundation prove to be very relevant to operational flood management. In this context, a recently developed method provides distributed water levels from SAR images. Furthermore, in view of improving numerical flood prediction, a variational data assimilation method (4D-var) using such distributed water...

Floodplain restoration projects are part of sustainable flood management model. However, in practice, they are rarely implemented. We analyze the failure of a floodplain restoration project that was supposed to be implemented on the River Rhône (France). Based on the analysis of floodplain restoration projects implementation literature, we identified several constraints on the implementation of...

Marajó Island shows an abundance of paleochannels easily mapped in its eastern portion, where vegetation consists mostly of savannas. SRTM data make possible to recognize paleochannels also in western Marajó, even considering the dense forest cover. A well preserved paleodrainage network from the adjacency of the town of Breves (southwestern Marajó Island) was investigated in this work combinin...

There is an increasing awareness that rivers need more room in order to safeguard flood safety under climate change conditions. Contemporary river management is creating room in the floodplains and allowing, within certain bounds, natural processes of sedimentation and erosion. One of the aims is to restore dynamic conditions, so as to get a sustainable and more diverse river ecosystem that can...

Based on the momentum transfer theory, an analytical model is proposed for the velocity and discharge distributions in compound channels with submerged vegetation on the floodplain. The partially vegetated channel was divided into three sub-regions, i.e. the main channel region, the floodplain region with submerged vegetation and the floodplain region without vegetation. For each region, the fo...

Field surveys and radiocarbon dating of buried logjams in the floodplain of an old-growth forest river demonstrate the formation of erosionresistant ‘‘hard points’’ on the floodplain of the Queets River, Washington. These hard points provide refugia for development of old-growth forest patches in frequently disturbed riparian environments dominated by immature forest. Our surveys show that loca...