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Publications (33)
1. Riparian zones are vital areas of interaction between land and rivers and are often degraded by several pressures such as urbanisation, intensive agriculture and river engineering works. 2. This policy brief provides five key policy messages and recommendations to be considered by policy-makers, scientists, managers, and stakeholders to enhance...
Geomorphic assessments are crucial to understanding stream processes, defining ecological stream conditions, and improving management and restoration recommendations. This project presents the first systematic geomorphic assessment of a perennial stream in Israel. The morphological quality index (MQI) protocol was applied in 2017–2018 to test its a...
The Alexander micro-estuary, located at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, is a typical example of small water bodies that suffer from a combination of urban and agricultural pollution, and overuse of its natural water sources. It is∼6.5 km long, with maximum depth of 3 m and maximum width of 45 m. To evaluate the anthropogenic stress on th...
Intensive soil degradation of agriculture lands during the past decades led local authorities in the Harod Catchment, northern Israel, to implement soil and water conservation practices. Herein, for the first time in Israel, we quantified the impact of these practices on water discharge, runoff/rainfall, and sediment yields at the catchment scale....
The impact of geomorphological structures on rainwater infiltration and groundwater recharge in the mountainous terrain of a semi-arid region was studied in the southern part of the Judean Western Mountain Aquifer (WMA) in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The study was conducted in two main typical geomorphological landscape units which includ...
Degraded water quality is one of the well‐documented adverse effect of intensive agriculture on the riverine environment. It can result from nutrient leaching from agricultural fields, stream flow harvesting, irrigation with treated wastewater, full or partial damming, and cultivating the riparian zone. The weight of each cause on the regime water...
Context
Although both plant cover and mulch are considered for erosion control in arid and semi-arid regions, they have divergent impacts on soil ecology.
Aim
We examined the effects of orchard floor management practices on the density and diversity of soil free-living nematode communities and relevant soil abiotic properties.
Methods
Soils were...
Micro-estuarine ecosystems have a surface area < 1 km2 and are abundant in Mediterranean regions. As a result of their small size, these systems are particularly vulnerable to effects of chemical pollution. Due to fluctuating flow conditions of base-flow dominated by treated wastewater effluents and flood events transporting rural and urban non-poi...
Pesticides are potentially toxic to aquatic systems, even at low concentration, depending on their individual ecotoxicological properties and their mixture composition. Thus, to evaluate possible ecological stress due to pesticide load, a thorough assessment of the potential toxicity of pesticide mixtures is required. Here we report water discharge...
Cultivated land is a major source of pesticides, which are transported with the runoff water and eroded soil during rainfall events and pollute riverine and estuarine environments. Common ecotoxicological assessments of riverine systems are mainly based on water sampling and analysis of only the dissolved phase, and address a single pesticide's tox...
Temporal changes and spatial patterns are often studied by analyzing land-cover changes (LCCs) using spaceborne images. LCC is an important factor, affecting runoff within watersheds. The objective was to estimate the effects of 20 years of LCCs on rainfall-runoff relations in an extreme rainfall event. A 1989 Landsat TM-derived classification map...
Temporal changes and spatial patterns are often studied by analyzing
land-cover changes (LCCs) using spaceborne images. LCC is an important
factor, affecting runoff regime within watersheds through processes such
as urbanization, agricultural activities, quarries and afforestation.
The objective of this research was to estimate the effects of 20 ye...
In general rill and interrill erosion are considered as the main soil
erosion processes over large cultivated areas in the Mediterranean
region. However, the long term impact of these processes is hard to
quantify and to model because soil loss is difficult to measure in
general, and because farmers tend to eliminate any evidences by
agriculture ac...
Water availability in arid regions is a major limiting factor, which
affect plant development. Therefore, knowledge about preliminary and
ongoing spatial & temporal conditions (e.g. land surface properties,
hydrological regime and vegetation dynamics) can improve greatly
afforestation practice. The Ambassadors forest is one of the Jewish
National F...
As the world population continues to grow, the need for food production
increases, which result in larger areas under intensive agriculture
activity. It is also known that intensive agriculture activity tends to
accelerate soil erosion rates. The coupling of these two processes put
under risk the fertile soils and the ability to maintain sustainabl...
A defining feature of braided rivers is their pattern of multiple interweaving channels. A set of laboratory experiments on braiding kinematics demonstrated that only a subset of the total apparent channels at any given time is actually transporting bed material and actively involved in channel morphodynamics. The number of active channels versus t...
Physical models of gravel braided rivers were used to investigate the adjustment of braiding intensity to step changes in channel-forming discharge and the mechanisms by which channel pattern adjustment and maintenance occurs. A braided channel developed at low discharge was subjected to two step increases in discharge between which the channel was...
Designing ecological flows in gravelly braided streams requires estimating the channel forming discharge in order to maintain the braided reach physical (allocation of flow and bed load) and ecological (maintaining the habitat diversity) functions. At present, compared to single meander streams, there are fewer guiding principles for river practiti...
Over the last decade significant soil losses have been observed in orchards and row crops fields that are managed by conventional tillage practices. These soil losses occur due to high frequency low intensity rain fall events which over time result in large amount of soil losses. This process is commonly ignored because cultivation erases any evide...
Geomorphological studies of braided rivers still lack a consistent measurement of the complexity of the braided pattern. Several simple indices have been proposed and two (channel count and total sinuosity) are the most commonly applied. For none of these indices has there been an assessment of the sampling requirements and there has been no system...
Desert ephemeral gravel bed streams typically have bed surfaces that are relatively unarmored compared to the substrate below, while gravel bed streams in humid and snowmelt areas typically have well-armored surfaces. The degree of armoring can be characterized in terms of an armor ratio defined as the ratio of the surface median size to the substr...
This study focuses on the formation of armour layers over a range of hydrologic conditions that includes two limiting cases; a relatively flat hydrograph that represents conditions produced by continuous snowmelt and a sharply peaked hydrograph that represents conditions associated with flash floods. To achieve our objective we analyzed field evide...
Braiding occurs in alluvial non cohesive river beds where stream power is high relative to sediment size. Previous research has clarified the local mechanisms (e.g. deposition of bars) causing braiding and the overall landscape conditions associated with braided rivers. Surprisingly there is not yet a complete explanation for one of the most import...
There is a growing literature on bedforms developed in gravel bedded streams such as clusters, cells, bedload sheets, imbrications and a variety of coarse surface layers. In particular, clusters, cells and imbrications tend to stabilize the bed by providing structural integrity and thereby reducing the transport rate. It has also been suggested in...
The impact of wastewater flow on the channel bed morphology was evaluated in four ephemeral streams in Israel and the Palestinian Territories: Nahal Og, Nahal Kidron, Nahal Qeult and Nahal Hebron. Channel changes before, during and after the halting of wastewater flow were monitored. The wastewater flow causes a shift from a dry ephemeral channel w...