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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Oxford, Mississippi » National Sedimentation Laboratory » Watershed Physical Processes Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #313472
Title: RVR meander - a toolbox for river meander planform design and evaluation

Author
item Langendoen, Eddy
item MOTTA, DAVIDE - Amec Environment & Infrastructure
item ABAD, JORGE - University Of Pittsburgh
item GARCIA, MARCELO - University Of Illinois
item FERNANDEZ, ROBERTO - University Of Illinois
item OBERG, NILS - University Of Illinois

Submitted to: Federal Interagency Sedimentation Conference Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 2/1/2015
Publication Date: 4/19/2015
Citation: Langendoen, E.J., Motta, D., Abad, J.D., Garcia, M.H., Fernandez, R., Oberg, N. 2015. RVR meander - a toolbox for river meander planform design and evaluation. 3rd Joint Federal Interagency Sedimentation Conference Proceedings. April 19-23, 2015, Reno, NV, pp. 1823-1830..

Interpretive Summary: Restoring the natural meandering planform of rivers is one of the most difficult aspects of river restoration. Simple methods based on regional empirical relationships of channel form have often failed to produce long-term, stable meander reaches without additional bank protection. Scientists at the USDA, ARS, National Sedimentation Laboratory in collaboration with researchers at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Illinois have developed the computer model RVR Meander that combines a quasi-analytical approach for flow, sediment transport, and bed evolution with a physically-based bank erosion module from the ARS channel evolution computer model CONCEPTS. The model can be executed within a Geographical Information System allowing: (1) rapid analysis of probable channel erosion locations on existing meandering rivers, or (2) optimal design of meandering planform that minimizes migration. The new platform can be used by federal and state agencies, such as the US Geological Survey, the US Bureau of Reclamation, the US Corps of Engineers, the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the US Environmental Protection Agency, to assess the long-term stability of re-meandered streams.

Technical Abstract: Restoring the meandering planform or spatial variability of historically meandering streams that have been channelized or highly disturbed is one of the most difficult aspects in river restoration. River planform and cross-sectional geometry are the result of complex interactions between flow, boundary materials, and channel morphology. Hence, simple methods based on the reference-reach concept or hydraulic geometry relationships have often failed to produce long-term, stable meander reaches without additional bank protection. More sophisticated river meander models use empirical relations to calculate rate of channel migration, limiting their applicability as they do not explicitly account for the physical properties of the floodplain soils. The RVR Meander platform merges the functionalities of: the first version of RVR Meander developed by the University of Illinois, which is based on the classical meander migration model of Ikeda, Parker and Sawai; and the streambank erosion algorithms of the channel evolution computer model CONCEPTS developed by the US Department of Agriculture. It is written in C++ language and is composed of different libraries for preprocessing, hydrodynamics, bank erosion, migration, filtering, plotting, and I/O. It runs as a stand-alone application on Windows and Linux operating systems or as a plugin for ESRI’s ArcMap software. RVR Meander has been used to model the migration of various rivers in the US and abroad.