The Role of Geomorphology and Hydrology in Determining Spatial-Scale Units for Ecohydraulics

Abstract

This chapter outlines how fundamental geomorphic and hydrologic understanding of channel networks has contributed to perception of how stream systems are structured, and ultimately to the development of spatial scale hierarchy frameworks. It presents a synthesis and comparison of selected frameworks and identifies some of the challenges associated with defining scale units. For several of the more common scale units, the segment, reach and meso scales, the chapter examines the geomorphic significance of the boundary criteria used to define them. A synthesis of these boundary criteria is proposed to provide a more practical and standardized approach to defining these spatial scales for resear..