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Rivers in Europe are more fragmented meaning their natural flows are interrupted by man-made barriers than any other continent’s rivers, new research shows.
In a four-year study spanning 36 European countries, scientists surveyed almost 1,700 miles of river by foot and found at least 1.2 million obstacles preventing European rivers from flowing freely. That’s more than one barrier for every mile of river (or 0.74 barriers per kilometre).
“The numbers we found are higher than expected, and show that European rivers are broken,” says Barbara Belletti, a river geomorphologist who led the study at the Polytechnic University of Milan.
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The works of Franz Kafka often describe people trying to reach a goal but never arriving – all ways are blocked, any possible detours turn out to be impassable. Migratory fish and invertebrates in European rivers today are in a similarly Kafkaesque situation. New research in the journal
Nature, published December 17, reveal that on average, there are at least 0.74 barriers per kilometre of European waterway. This means that an organism can hardly travel more than 1,000 meters without being stopped by a dam, weir, culvert, sluice or ramp.
The movement of flowing water is the essential nature of all running water systems, from small rivulets to large rivers. But this natural movement, and especially its pulsing nature, with flood events and droughts, is too dynamic for human beings who have sought to become “master and possessor of nature” (Descartes,
Research Press Release
Nature
December 17, 2020
European rivers are fragmented by more than one million barriers, such as dams, according to a comprehensive assessment published in
Nature this week. The study includes a survey of more than 2,700 kilometres of rivers, which suggests that the number of barriers in European rivers has been underestimated by 61 per cent.
Rivers are important ecosystems that also provide socio-economic services for society. However, human activities have altered their flow with artificial barriers such as dams, weirs and fords. Fragmentation can affect the ecosystems of the rivers but assessing the effects of these barriers has been impeded by a lack of information. Barbara Belletti, Carlos Garcia de Leaniz and colleagues collated regional, national and global datasets to assess the number of individual barriers on rivers. They walked along selected stretches of rivers to record barrier numbers and characteristics, revealing that the original datas