River Continuum Concept - Development and Application of The Concept

Development and Application of The Concept

The first comprehensive presentation of the 1980 concept was part of a two-day conference at Stroud Water Research Center, whose head director was Robin Vannote. It was the result of a multi-year study conducted by the Rockefeller Foundation. The publication of the hypothesis was released later that same year under the title "The River Continuum Concept" in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. The concept built on the work of other American limnologists such as Ruth Patrick, from which the modern riverine ecosystem model has emerged, and Luna Leopold, which deals with the physical changes of water. The essential goal of the concept was to further assess and explain the various communities in the system. Vannote himself described the current situation as follows, "in those days, most people studied a square meter of water to death ”. Meaning that previous research was always only on small pieces of water and only rarely was the entire river system considered, allowing for the creation of a general model.

After its publication, the River Continuum Concept was adopted as the accepted model in the limnology community, becoming a favorite means for describing the communities living in flowing water. Here it broke the classic idea of riverine structure. Previous approaches had their disadvantages because they only described small zones of water and had no consideration for the system in its entirety.

In practice, the River Continuum Concept is used today mainly for environmental assessment of rivers. River studies that assess riverine biological communities and have determined the species composition of an area can then be compared with the ideal species composition from the River Continuum Concept. From there, any variations in species composition may shed light on disturbances that might be occurring to offset the system.