Читать книгу A Field Guide to British Rivers - George Heritage - Страница 11

Rivers in the United Kingdom are an important component of the natural and social environment. Humans have long influenced valley bottom ecosystems, with impacts recorded consistently across Europe since the Bronze Age (Brown et al. 2018). Through the historic period, there has been a near‐consistent alteration of system character and functionality with ecosystem dynamics suppressed to facilitate human exploitation of watercourses and valley bottoms. Landscape‐scale disturbance across regimes that sustain habitats and biotic communities have resulted in a permanent loss of environmental heterogeneity and biodiversity (Warren and Liss 1980).