Network Dynamic Connectivity for Identifying Hotspots of Fluvial Geomorphic Change

Abstract:

The hierarchical branching structure of a river network serves as a template upon which environmental fluxes of water, sediment, nutrients, etc. are conveyed and organized both spatially and temporally within a basin. Dynamical processes occurring on a river network tend to heterogeneously distribute fluxes on the network, often concentrating them into “clusters,” i.e., places of excess flux accumulation. Here, we put forward the hypothesis that places in the network predisposed (due to process dynamics and network topology) to accumulate excess bed-material sediment over a considerable river reach and over a considerable period of time reflect locations where a local imbalance in sediment flux may occur thereby highlighting a susceptibility to potential fluvial geomorphic change. We have developed a framework where we are able to track fluxes on a “static” river network using a simplified Lagrangian transport model and use the spatial-temporal distribution of that flux to form a new “dynamic” network of the flux that evolves over time. From this dynamic network we can quantify the dynamic connectivity of the flux and integrate emergent “clusters” over time through a cluster persistence index (CPI) to assess the persistence of mass throughout the network. The framework was applied to sand transport on the Greater Blue Earth River Network in Minnesota where three hotspots of fluvial geomorphic change have been defined based on high rates of channel migration observed from aerial photographic analysis. Locations within the network with high CPI coincided with two of these hotspots, possibly suggesting that channel migration here is driven by sediment deposition “pushing” the stream into and thus eroding the opposite bank. The third hotspot was not identified by high CPI, but instead is believed to be a hotspot of streamflow-driven change based on additional information and the fact that high bed shear stress coincided with this hotspot. The proposed network-based dynamic connectivity framework has the potential to place dynamical processes occurring at small scales into a network context to understand how reach-scale changes cascade into network-scale effects, useful for informing the large-scale consequences of local management actions.