The significance of riparian vegetation on river flow and material transport is not in dispute. Conveyance laws, sediment erosion and deposition, and element cycling must all be adjusted from their canonical rough-wall boundary layer to accommodate the presence of aquatic plants. In turn, the growth and colonization of riparian vegetation are affected by fluvial processes and river morphology on longer time scales. These interactions and feedbacks at multiple time scales are now drawing significant attention within the research community given their relevance to river restoration. For this reason, a review summarizing methods, general laws, qualitative cognition, and quantitative models regarding the interplay between aquatic plants, flow dynamics, and sediment transport in vegetated rivers is in order. Shortcomings, pitfalls, knowledge gaps, and daunting challenges to the current state of knowledge are also covered. As a multidisciplinary research topic, a future research agenda and opportunities pertinent to river management and enhancement of ecosystem services are also highlighted.

Floating treatment wetlands (FTWs) are efficient at wastewater treatment; however, data and physical models describing water flow through them remain limited. A two‐domain model is proposed dividing the flow region into an upper part characterizing the flow through suspended vegetation and an inner part describing the vegetation‐free zone. The suspended vegetation domain is represented as a porous medium characterized by constant permeability thereby allowing Biot's Law to be used to describe the mean velocity and stress profiles. The flow in the inner part is bounded by asymmetric stresses arising from interactions with the suspended vegetated (porous) base and solid channel bed. An asymmetric eddy viscosity model is employed to derive an integral expression for the shear stress and the mean velocity profiles in this inner layer. The solution features an asymmetric shear stress index that reflects two different roughness conditions over the vegetation‐induced auxiliary bed and the physical channel bed. A phenomenological model is then presented to explain this index. An expression for the penetration depth into the porous medium defined by 10% of the maximum shear stress is also derived. The predicted shear stress profile, local mean velocity profile, and bulk velocity agree with the limited experiments published in the literature.

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