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Braided streams tend to occur in rivers with high sediment loads or coarse grain sizes, and in rivers with steeper slopes than typical rivers with straight or meandering channel patterns. They are also associated with rivers with rapid and frequent variation in the amount of water they carry, i.e., with " flashy " rivers, and with rivers with ...
Low gradient channels of rivers and streams can be divided into braided rivers, wandering rivers, single thread sinuous rivers (meandering), and anastomosing rivers. The channel type developed depends on stream gradient, riparian vegetation and sediment supply.
These channels are classified as a composite form of which the individual channel belts may have braided, meandering or straight channels. Although similar to, and even encompass other channel types, anastomosed rivers are their own entity and have just begun to be studied by geologists , revealing that much is still unknown.
The degree of meandering of the channel of a river, stream, or other watercourse is measured by its sinuosity. The sinuosity of a watercourse is the ratio of the length of the channel to the straight line down-valley distance. Streams or rivers with a single channel and sinuosities of 1.5 or more are defined as meandering streams or rivers. [1] [3]
Braided rivers have complex and unpredictable channel patterns, and sediment size tends to vary among streams. [3] It is these features that are responsible for the formations of braid bars. Braided streams are often overfed with massive amounts of sediment which creates multiple stream channels within one dominant pair of flood bank plains. [2]
Natural alluvial channels have a variety of morphological patterns, but can be generally described as straight, meandering, braided, or anastomosing. [3] Different channel patterns result from differences in bankfull discharge, gradient, sediment supply, and bank material. [3]
The terms river morphology and its synonym stream morphology are used to describe the shapes of river channels and how they change in shape and direction over time. The morphology of a river channel is a function of a number of processes and environmental conditions, including the composition and erodibility of the bed and banks (e.g., sand, clay, bedrock); erosion comes from the power and ...
When referring to river channel migration, it is typically in reference to meandering streams. In braided streams, channel change is driven by sediment transport. [1] It has been proposed that lateral migration is a particularly dominant erosive process in savanna landscapes. [2]