Some comments from a reviewer on a recent manuscript of mine dealing with responses to disturbance in geomorphology got me to thinking about the concept of disturbance in the environmental sciences. Though the paper is a geomorphology paper (hopefully to be) in a geomorphology journal, the referee insisted that I should be citing some of the “foundational” ecological papers on disturbance. These, according to the referee, turned out to be papers from the 1980s and 1990s that are widely cited in the aquatic ecology and stream restoration literature, but are hardly foundational in general.

Consideration of the role of disturbance goes back to the earliest days of ecology, and is a major theme in the classic papers of, e.g., Warming, Cowles, and Clements in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. A general reconsideration (“reimagining” is the term many would use, but I’ve grown to hate that overused word) of the role of disturbance in ecological systems was well underway by the 1970s, and the last five years or so have seem some very interesting syntheses of these emerging ideas (two I especially like are Mori, 2011 and Pulsford et al., 2014).

Fluvial geomorphologists, along with hydrologists and river engineers, have long been concerned with the flows or discharges that are primarily responsible for forming and shaping river channels. In the mid-20^th century it was suggested that this flow is associated with bankfull stage—the stage right at the threshold of overflowing the channel—and that this occurs, on average, about every year or two in humid-climate perennial streams. If you have to choose just one flow to fixate on—and sometimes you do, for various management, design, and assessment purposes—and have no other a priori information about the river, bankfull is indeed the best choice. But, of course, nature is not that simple.