Sediment grading and braiding of gravel-bed rivers (abstract)
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Abstract
Recent studies have shown that the river bed topography is very sensitive to the composition of bed sediment. So, human interventions and natural processes leading to changes in sediment size grading might result in morphological adjustments of river reaches. This study deals with the effects of changing sediment size grading on the braiding intensity and bar characteristics of gravel-bed rivers. Previous studies have shown that bars decrease in height (Lanzoni, 2000, Lanzoni and Tubino, 1999) and braiding intensity increases (Teramoto and Tsujimoto, 2006) as sediment become less sorted but these conclusions were based on short-term laboratory experiments and simplified linear analyses. This study focuses on the long-term developments to establish whether these conclusions hold also for real rivers.