Session Lead: Labeeb Ahmed (USGS)

Co-Lead(s): Marina Metes (USGS)

Session Format: Oral Presentations

Session Description: 

River corridors consist of channels, adjacent floodplains, and the riparian area. The condition and composition of river corridors in terms of geology, soils, landforms, vegetation, and land use significantly impact water quality. By quantifying processes within river corridors such as sediment fluxes, our understanding and management of these complex systems can be improved especially in the context of climate change. The aim of this session is to provide an overview of approaches to characterize river corridor conditions and communicate the information to decisionmakers to improve channel and floodplain management. From a technical perspective, advances in remote sensing technologies such as high-resolution imagery and lidar along with advances in computational efficiency and artificial intelligence have revolutionized our ability to characterize landforms such as channels and floodplains at fine resolution (~ 1-meter) and regional scales, model complex processes such as sediment fluxes, ground water interactions, stream temperature, and stream flow periodicity. The inventory of such key processes and measures have enabled support and development of better channel and floodplain management strategies and enabled a better understanding of channel stability. Understanding and mapping channel stability is essential for inventorying stream restoration opportunities, assessing the vulnerability of infrastructure to flooding, and for deriving floodplain ecosystem services. Creating such data and making it easily accessible and interpretable by decision makers are needed to make river corridor science actionable.

Presentations (abstracts):

  1. Dr. Robert Walter, Dr. Dorothy Merritts, Dr. Patrick Fleming, Dr. Chris Williams: Legacies lost and found: Improving stream restoration practice and water quality policies
  2. James Pizzuto: New Data On Mid-Atlantic Piedmont River Corridor Sediment Transport Processes From the mid-Holocene to the Present: Implications for Restoration and Management
  3. Zach Clifton: Hidden legacies: investigating a buried pre-colonial stream corridor in the Atlantic Coastal Plain, Maryland, USA
  4. Dave Guignet,Eileen Gladd, P.E.: Application of Geospatial Data in Flood Hazard Mapping
  5. Gina Lee, Andrew Miller: Application of high-resolution remote sensing to support hydraulic modeling and measurement of velocity fields
  6. Rohith A N, Cibin Raj, Alfonso Mejia: Development of a medium-range ensemble streamflow forecasting system for the Potomac River Basin
  7. Ollie Gilchrest: Hydrodynamics and Sediment Transport in the Tidally Influenced James River, VA