Dr. Kevin Anderson will present his monthly lunchtime lecture in his series on The Geography of Flowing Water: Rivers, Streams, Nature, and Culture.  April's topic is Bottomland: Life on the Floodplain.

On maps, one sees a line drawn depicting a river, but this thin line depicts merely the river channel and not the river fully realized. When a river spreads out across its floodplains, we are reminded that the thin line is a poor representation of its fully realized self. The hydrological reality of a river is that it will fill its floodplain frequently, much more frequently than the terms “100-year” or “500-year” suggest. The ecological reality of a river, also, spreads out across these floodplains in the form of bottomland habitat that can range from forest to swamps to oxbow lakes. In this lecture, we will explore the ecology of rivers away from their banks and across the rich bottomland habitat that can fill their floodplains.