Threats to Western United States Riparian Ecosystems

"In the western United States, riparian ecosystems occupy a small percentage of the landscape (<2%), but they provide essential ecological functions for both human and biotic populations. Despite their small portion of the landscape, western riparian ecosystems provide habitat for about one-third of the plant species. In arid regions like the Southwest and the Great Basin, about 60% of all vertebrate species and 70% of all threatened and endangered species are riparian obligates. This bibliography is a compendium of 480 state-of- knowledge publications about the threats affecting western U.S.A. riparian ecosystems and it is a companion to the website: http:// www.rmrs.nau.edu/awa/ripthreatbib/. The website contains Adobe Acrobat PDFs of the publications or it directs readers to journal websites where the PDFs can be downloaded, read, or ordered. This bibliography can be obtained as a hard copy or downloaded as an electronic version from the Rocky Mountain Research Station's Publications website: http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/publications/. The bibliography presents publications on a range of riparian threats elucidated by Obedzinski and others (2001) and Theobald and others (2010). The topics include agriculture, climate change, dam construction, disease, drought, invasive species, fire, floods, flow regulation, forest harvesting, grazing, groundwater depletion, insects, mining, recreation, roads, water diversions, urbanization, and water quality. Most of the bibliographic entries deal with three or more threats and are listed as multiple threats. The two topics with the most references are grazing and invasive species."--Summary.