Seasonal Urban River Restoration Strategies in Face with Environmental Hazards Based on an Ecological Resilience Approach

Resilience is a response to the crisis in the face of environmental risks in today’s changing world. Seasonal urban rivers are one of the causes of environmental hazards in cities whose characters are subject to change during droughts and floods. They have often been turned into channels for flood control and have lost their ecological identity. Developing the best strategy for the resilience of seasonal urban rivers requires research on the contribution of the resilience approach to the preservation of seasonal urban river ecosystems against environmental hazards. Moreover, the way to implement such a strategy could be a response to the crisis. This resilience approach research examines and criticizes the field of ecology and is concerned with preserving urban rivers according to their ecological structure. Based on the literature review in the two fields of resilience and ecology, principles and components were identified and analyzed using a deductive-inferential method. As a result, the best macro strategy for seasonal urban river ecological resilience is process-based river restoration, driven by the ecological structure of the river ecosystem, which is made possible by micro-strategies such as understanding the main causes of ecosystem degradation or change, determining physical, chemical, and biological processes, sustainable watershed management, increasing the resilience of river ecosystems in the face of future environmental hazards, preventing human interference in natural processes, and creating a new balance between socio-economic needs. This research presents strategies to create diversity in plant and animal species in the riverbed, generate modularity in the ecological patches of the river ecosystem, improve the services of the river ecosystem, limit and control the effects of ecological variables that are associated with the river, adapt river restoration to slow key variables, develop regulations based on non-human interference in the structure of the river ecosystem, raise cultural awareness in this area using social capital, and ecological innovation in creating sustainable conditions after the crisis and disruption.