A stream is a body of water with a current, confined within a bed and stream banks. Depending on its locale or certain characteristics, a stream may be referred to as a branch, brook, beck, burn, creek, "crick", gill (occasionally ghyll), kill, lick, rill, river, syke, bayou, rivulet, streamage, wash, run or runnel.
Streams are important as conduits in the water cycle, instruments in groundwater recharge, and corridors for fish and wildlife migration. The biological habitat in the immediate vicinity of a stream is called a riparian zone. Given the status of the ongoing Holocene extinction, streams play an important corridor role in connecting fragmented habitats and thus in conserving biodiversity. The study of streams and waterways in general is known as surface hydrology and is a core element of environmental geography.
Read more about Stream: Types, Other Names, Parts of A Stream, Sources, Characteristics, Intermittent and Ephemeral Streams, Drainage Basins
Famous quotes containing the word stream:
“Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“All the stream that’s roaring by
Came out of a needle’s eye....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)