The Physical Diversity and Assessment of a Large River System: The Murray–Darling Basin, Australia

Fundamental to the nature of scientific knowledge production is the sequential revision of basic concepts and explanatory evidence. Our theoretical understanding, knowledge of processes and dynamic morphology, and approaches to the management of large rivers have seen major advancements since the publication of the first volume of Large Rivers in 2007. Models of the organization of river ecosystem processes have expanded from the idea of a river continuum (cf. Vannote et al. 1980) to that of a patch mosaic (cf. Thorp et al. 2008). Application of hierarchy theory has shown the need to assess different biophysical processes at different scales (Dollar et al. 2007" Thoms et al. 2018a).