[1] In order to assess the risk of scour and fill of spawning redds during floods, an understanding of the relations among river discharge, bed mobility, and scour and fill depths in areas of the streambed heavily utilized by spawning salmon is needed. Our approach coupled numerical flow modeling and empirical data from the Trinity River, California, to quantify spatially explicit zones of differential bed mobility and to identify specific areas where scour and fill is deep enough to impact redd viability. Spatial patterns of bed mobility, based on model-predicted Shields stress, indicate that a zone of full mobility was limited to a central core that expanded with increasing flow strength. The likelihood and maximum depth of measured scour increased with increasing modeled Shields stress. Because redds were preferentially located in coarse substrate in shallow areas with close proximity to the stream banks, they were less likely to become mobilized or to risk deep scour during high-flow events but were more susceptible to sediment deposition.Citation: May, C. L., B. Pryor, T. E. Lisle, and M. Lang (2009), Coupling hydrodynamic modeling and empirical measures of bed mobility to predict the risk of scour and fill of salmon redds in a large regulated river, Water Resour. Res., 45, W05402,

No abstract

The dynamics of sediment transport capacity in gravel-bed rivers is critical to understanding the formation and preservation of fluvial landforms and formulating sediment-routing models in drainage systems. We examine transport-storage relations during cycles of aggradation and degradation by augmenting observations of three events of channel aggradation and degradation in Cuneo Creek, a steep (3%) gravel-bed channel in northern California, with measurements from a series of flume runs modeling those events. An armored, single-thread channel was formed before feed rates were increased in each aggradation run. Output rates increased as the channel became finer and later widened, steepened, and braided. After feed rates were cut, output rates remained high or increased in early stages of degradation as the incising channel remained fine-grained, and later decreased as armoring intensified. If equilibrium was not reached before sediment feed rate was cut, then a rapid transition from a braided channel to a single-thread channel caused output rates for a given storage volume to be higher during degradation than during aggradation. Variations in channel morphology, and surface bed texture during runs that modeled the three cycles of aggradation and degradation were similar to those observed in Cuneo Creek and provide confidence in interpretations of the history of change: Cuneo Creek aggraded rapidly as it widened, shallowed, and braided, then degraded rapidly before armoring stabilized the channel. Such morphology-driven changes in transport capacity may explain the formation of flood terraces in proximal channels. Transport-storage relations can be expected to vary between aggradation and degradation and be influenced by channel conditions at the onset of changes in sediment supply. Published in 2011. This article is a US Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.

Reservoir releases on large regulated rivers are increasingly being used to rejuvenate riverine habitat downstream of dams. Determining the effective flow level is complicated by the trade-off between mobilizing bed particles and retaining coarse sediment in rivers with low sediment supply. This study determined mobilization and transport distance of bed particles using motion-sensing radio transmitting particles that approximated the reach-average D 84 grain size. The distribution of shear stress at initial motion varied substantially between flood events, and suggests that the sequence of flood events and the history of under-threshold flows may be an important determinant of bed strength and thus particle mobility. In addition, particle activity was greatest on the rising limb of each flood and was maximized at near bankfull flow. Travel distances did not vary between floods when scaled by transport event duration, and a negative exponential distribution was a good fit to the data. Results of this study provide important insight into individual particle movement, which can be used to inform flow releases and understand the effects of flood magnitude on particle mobility and transport.