Hydrodynamics of Aquatic Ecosystems: Current State, Challenges, and Prospects
Hydrodynamics of Aquatic Ecosystems: Current State, Challenges, and Prospects
Hydrodynamics of Aquatic Ecosystems: Current State, Challenges, and Prospects
School of Engineering
University of Aberdeen, Scotland, AB24 3UE, United Kingdom
Abstract
The paper endorses a recently emerged interdisciplinary research
subject Hydrodynamics of Aquatic Ecosystems, defined as a study
of flow-organism interactions in running waters with particular
focus on relevant transport processes and mutual physical
impacts occurring at multiple scales from the sub-organism scale
to the organism patch mosaic scale (comparable to the flow
width). This new research area emerges at the interfaces between
environmental fluid mechanics, biomechanics, and aquatic
ecology, bridging these disciplines together and offering new
promising research avenues. After a brief review of the current
state, the paper focuses on the challenges that this subject area
currently faces, and then outlines research directions to pursue
for resolving the highlighted challenges.
Introduction
Sixteen years ago a prominent aquatic ecologist B. Statzner
stressed that a broader incorporation of aspects of fluid
dynamics into studies of various ecosystems will advance general
ecological theory faster than past or current research routes,
which largely ignore(d) the physical principles of moving air or
water [26]. Since then, the situation has not changed much [27],
reflecting a slow progress in the implementation of fluid
mechanical concepts into ecological theories. There are at least
three reasons for such a slow progress in the current knowledge.
First, measurements at the organism scales still represent great
challenges and thus data related to these scales remain very
limited. Second, most studies of flow-organism interactions pay
little attention to the biomechanical properties of organisms,
which change significantly across species, scales, and
environments and are poorly understood. Third, the subject of
flow-organism interactions lies at the borders between fluid
mechanics, ecology, and biomechanics, i.e., at the discipline
interfaces which are typically avoided by researchers. Another
problem that has also to be addressed is how to integrate fluid
mechanical, biomechanical, and ecological processes together
and how to upscale the effects of these processes from the suborganism scale to the patch mosaic scale. Because of these
knowledge gaps, the progress in studies of flow-biota interactions
is slow and a solid unifying interdisciplinary platform is urgently
required to accelerate it and to enhance current ecological
concepts.
This paper and talk are an attempt to further enhance and
promote such a platform as an emerging research area at the
interfaces between environmental fluid mechanics, aquatic
ecology, and biomechanics. This new area, Hydrodynamics of
Aquatic Ecosystems, bridges these disciplines together and can be
defined as a study of flow-organism interactions in running
waters with particular focus on relevant transport processes and
mutual physical impacts occurring at multiple scales from the
sub-organism scale to the organism patch mosaic scale
comparable to the flow width [19]. Being an important part of its
mother disciplines, Hydrodynamics of Aquatic Ecosystems deals
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Biomechanical challenges
Biomechanics of freshwater organisms is still in its infancy and
poses significant challenges for studies of flow-biota interactions.
They can be illustrated using aquatic plants in streams as an
example. Aquatic plants in streams and rivers exhibit a great
variety of morphological forms and encounter complex loads due
to a mixture of tension, compression, bending, torsion, and shear.
These complexities take place at multiple scales, from sub-cell
scale to cell scale, sub-leaf scale, leaf scale, shoot (leaves + stem)
scale, individual plant (sum of shoots), plant patch (aggregation
of plants) scale, and plant patch mosaic (aggregation of plant
patches) scale. Biomechanical characteristics at larger scales
represent some integration of properties at smaller scales and,
thus, at each of these scales the plants should be treated as
structures rather than simple materials. Preliminary studies (e.g.,
[10, 32]) suggest that the plants can be defined as composite,
anisotropic, viscoelastic, highly heterogeneous materials or
structures. Thus the primary key challenge to address on this
front is Challenge 4: What are the most appropriate structural
models of biota? Indeed, it is not even clear how accurately the
Hookean model (i.e., linear stress strain relation) and the
associated elasticity modulus E represent aquatic plants at
different scales.
The mentioned complexities may explain why, until now, we do
not have a set of widely accepted quantitative characteristics of
plant geometry and mechanical properties. There are at least
three groups of parameters that may be required: (1) plant
morphology characteristics; (2) plant material characteristics; and
(3) plant-flow interaction characteristics. The translation of
biomechanical properties from one scale to another may involve
techniques of spatial-averaging and homogenisation similar to
those developed for modelling composite materials and material
microstructure (e.g., [29]). The definition of these parameters and
recipes for their estimates represent Challenge 5: How can
morphological and biomechanical properties of biota be defined,
measured and/or quantified at different scales?
Assuming that suitable measures of biomechanical properties are
found then the next significant issue to resolve is Challenge 6:
How can hydrodynamic and biomechanical properties be linked
together? In principle, coupling fluid mechanical and
biomechanical processes can be done at different levels of rigour,
from consideration of joint similarity numbers to spatiallyaveraged coupled differential equations. Examples of the first
approach are given in [2, 19] while the second approach will be
briefly described in the next section.
Ecological challenges
Traditional approaches in aquatic ecology are largely descriptive
and are mainly based on bulk parameters such as community
composition, biomass, population size, and other measures. The
effects of hydraulic habitat on these parameters are typically
studied using a variety of statistical techniques that link
ecological parameters to bulk flow properties such as flow rate,
depth-averaged velocity, surface velocity, or stream power.
Hydrodynamics of Aquatic Ecosystems provides a process-based
alternative to these approaches which are essentially empirical in
nature. Indeed, preliminary considerations (e.g., [7, 9, 19, 20, 2628] and references therein) suggest that organism functioning,
morphology, and role in river ecosystems are largely driven by
the interplay of two key groups of environmental processes: (i)
physical interactions between flow and organisms (e.g., due to
flow-induced forces and reaction forces generated by organisms);
and (ii) ecologically relevant mass-transfer-uptake processes
(e.g., due to molecular/turbulent diffusion), including
photosynthesis aspects when relevant. This primary hypothesis
leads to a number of secondary hypotheses that may further
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