Journal ArticleDOI
Large wood storage in streams of the Eastern Italian Alps and the relevance of hillslope processes
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
In this paper, the authors present extensive field measurements of LW storage and channel morphology carried out in 13 channels of the Eastern Italian Alps with drainage areas ranging from 1.2 to 70 km2, mean bed slope between 0.03 and 0.38, and channel width between 2 and 20 m.Abstract:
[1] An understanding of the dynamics of large wood (LW) in mountain channels provides the basis for evaluating natural morphological patterns as well as managing potentially hazardous wood transport during flood events. Few studies have investigated the distribution of LW in managed streams of the Alps across a wide spatial scale. This paper presents extensive field measurements of LW storage and channel morphology carried out in 13 channels of the Eastern Italian Alps with drainage areas ranging from 1.2 to 70 km2, mean bed slope between 0.03 and 0.38, and channel width between 2 and 20 m. More than 9000 LW elements were measured in the 33 reaches surveyed. A geostatistical, geographic information system (GIS)-based model for wood recruitment from hillslope instabilities was also developed and applied to the study basin. LW storage in the study channels results as being much lower than in seminatural basins of comparable size and climate, and only basins characterized by extensive mass wasting processes contain high wood loads with relevant morphological consequences. The statistical analysis of LW storage at the reach scale indicates that unit stream power is apparently the most significant hydromorphological factor influencing LW storage, in agreement with studies in other world regions. However, we argue that the effect of unit stream power on LW storage is not only linked to flow transport capacity but also derives from its association with LW supply and valley morphology. Both the GIS model and statistical tests on field data indicate that hillslope instabilities connected to the channel network dominate the LW recruitment volume and the distribution of in-channel wood storage.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Recent advances quantifying the large wood dynamics in river basins: New methods and remaining challenges
Virginia Ruiz-Villanueva,Virginia Ruiz-Villanueva,Hervé Piégay,Angela M. Gurnell,Richard A. Marston,Markus Stoffel,Markus Stoffel +6 more
TL;DR: In this article, a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative summary of recent advances regarding the different processes involved in large wood dynamics in fluvial systems including wood budgeting and wood mechanics is presented.
Journal ArticleDOI
Large wood recruitment and transport during large floods: A review
TL;DR: In this article, a review of the literature available on wood transport during large floods is presented, drawing extensively on the authors' own experience in mountain and piedmont rivers, published and unpublished.
Journal ArticleDOI
Bridging the gaps: An overview of wood across time and space in diverse rivers
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify other knowledge gaps related to wood recruitment, transport, storage, and how beavers influence wood dynamics in large and small-to medium-sized rivers.
Journal ArticleDOI
How natural are Alpine mountain rivers? Evidence from the Italian Alps
TL;DR: In this paper, a summary of published as well as unpublished works on historical channel adjustments in rivers of the Italian Alps is presented in order to document the impacts deriving from human pressure at different basin scales and for different river morphologies.
Journal ArticleDOI
Two-dimensional numerical modeling of wood transport
Virginia Ruiz-Villanueva,Ernest Bladé,Martí Sánchez-Juny,Belen Marti-Cardona,Andrés Díez-Herrero,José María Bodoque +5 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a numerical model to simulate wood transport coupled with a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model was developed, where wood drag forces were incorporated as additional source terms into the shallow water equations, which are solved together with wood transport by using the finite volume method.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Channel-reach morphology in mountain drainage basins
TL;DR: In this article, a classification of channel-reach morphology in mountain drainage basins synthesizes stream morphologies into seven distinct reach types: colluvial, bedrock, and five alluvial channel types (cascade, step pool, plane bed, pool rime and dune ripple).
Journal ArticleDOI
A physically based model for the topographic control on shallow landsliding
TL;DR: In this paper, a model for the topographic influence on shallow landslide initiation is developed by coupling digital terrain data with near-surface through flow and slope stability models, which predicts the degree of soil saturation in response to a steady state rainfall for topographic elements defined by the intersection of contours and flow tube boundaries.
Journal ArticleDOI
Effects of large organic material on channel form and fluvial processes
TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of large organic debris on the fluvial processes and channel form may be very significant, depending on the size of the debris, size of stream, and many other factors, their effects range from insignificant to very important.
Journal ArticleDOI
Large wood and fluvial processes
TL;DR: In this article, a conceptual framework for evaluating the storage and dynamics of wood in rivers is defined, which ranks the relative importance of hydrological characteristics (flow regime, sediment transport regime), wood characteristics (piece size, buoyancy, morphological complexity) and geomorphological characteristics (channel width, geomorphology style) in ''Small, ''Medium'' and ''Large'' rivers.
Related Papers (5)
Large wood and fluvial processes
A quantitative framework for evaluating the mass balance of in-stream organic debris
Lee Benda,Joan C. Sias +1 more
Patterns and processes of wood debris accumulation in the Queets river basin, Washington
Tim B. Abbe,David R. Montgomery +1 more