Restoring the Middle Ebro Floodplains

Floodplains are flood-dependent ecosystems that are an integral part of the river. As a consequence, they have to be considered when restoring streams since it influences success on achieving restoration targets. At the Ebro river (NE Spain), one reach which is willing to be restored was selected to evaluate the influence of the river disturbance regime over floodplain structure and functioning in the context of strong and repeated anthropogenic disturbances. To evaluate the effect on ecosystem structure, different components were selected to study the effect of the river disturbance regime at different spatio-temporal scales: a) Landscape changes; b) Surface water hydrogeochemistry; c) Flooded sediment and d) riparian understory structure. Moreover, total organic carbon and (TOC)nitrogen (TN) accretion was selected as the function to be analysed to evaluate the effect of the river disturbance regime on ecosystem functioning.