Pool-riffle Maintenance in Mountain Streams

Abstract:

Pool-riffles are maintained through a combination of at least several mechanisms that operate and interact over a range of temporal and spatial scales. Velocity or shear reversal is subsumed within several of these mechanisms, however a growing body of work suggests that (1) flow convergence into pools, (2) structuring of riffle crest sediments, and (3) local feedbacks between flood stage bedform evolution and hydrodynamics may be disproportionately important. We additionally propose that temporal and spatial patterns of sediment sorting across pool-riffles may also provide some level of bedform maintenance. A comprehensive understanding of these maintenance mechanisms is needed.

We will report results of several flume experiments for autogenic pool-riffles. The experiments examined pool-riffle maintenance processes under variable flood and sediment supply conditions. A focus of our work is to characterize spatial and temporal patterns of pool-riffle sediment sorting, and to examine this in relation to temporal patterns of bedform evolution. The experiments represent a 5:1 scale-model of a prototype reach of a pool-riffle stream located within the University of British Columbia Malcolm Knapp Research Forest, Maple Ridge, BC.