https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00563055/document

Sedimentary processes and sediment dispersal in the southern Strait of Georgia, BC, Canada.

Neoichnology of the lower delta plain: Fraser River Delta, British Columbia, Canada: Implications for the ichnology of deltas

Asymmetry in Holocene river deltas: Patterns, controls, and stratigraphic effects

Six thousand years of coastline evolution in the Guadalfeo deltaic system (southern Iberian Peninsula)

This review presents a summary of the influences of floods on river ecology, both instream and on the adjacent floodplain, mostly in a Canadian context. It emphasizes that ecological impacts and benefits can be highly dependent on flood-generation processes and their magnitude and timing. In Canada, floods can occur under open-water or ice-influenced river conditions. The ecological impacts of floods generated from ice jamming are particularly relevant in Canadian ecosystems due to the potentially higher water levels produced and suspended sediment concentrations that can be detrimental to instream aquatic habitat, but beneficial to floodplains. Large floods provide a major source of physical disturbance. Moderate floods with shorter return periods can be beneficial to aquatic habitats by providing woody debris that contributes to habitat complexity and diversity, by flushing fine sediments and by providing important food sources from terrestrial origins. Floods also influence water-quality variables such...

An ecological perspective on floods in Canada

@. ABSTRACT I BARRIE, J.V. and CURRIE, R.G., 2000. Human impact on the sedimentary regime of the Fraser River Delta, Canada. Journal of Coastal Research, 16(3), 747-755. West Palm Beach (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. The Fraser River Delta is a Holocene, river dominated feature in a macrotidal environment, built into the deep (>300 m) waters of the Strait of Georgia on Canada's Pacific coast. The delta has been modified to provide port facilities and a navigable channel for the city of Vancouver. Prior to the confinement of the Fraser River to its present channels, during the early part of this century, the distributary river channels regularly switched and migrated across the entire delta front. The annual river load (approximately 17.3 X 106 tonnes) is 65% silt and clay, and 35% sand. Today, most of the sand is removed from the system by dredging and the mud is transported in a plume past the intertidal estuary and northwards into the basin by the dominant flood tidal flow. Three causeways that cross the intertidal zone to the delta foreslope act as barriers to the dominant northward sediment transport causing estuarine and localized seabed erosion. The presence of the causeways results in tidal flow separation with clockwise back eddies forming behind the structures focusing the tidal energy to the intertidal zone. On the delta foreslope, off the southern causeways, an eroded submarine distributary channel subaqueous fan complex has been exposed by enhanced tidal flows that scour the seabed and form northward migrating subaqueous dunes increasing the delta slope and, consequently, the risk of slope failure.

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J. Vaughn Barrie

Papers

Human Impact on the Sedimentary Regime of the Fraser River Delta, Canada