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A stream with cohesive banks that are resistant to erosion will form narrow, deep, meandering channels, whereas a stream with highly erodible banks will form wide, shallow channels, preventing the helical flow of the water necessary for meandering and resulting in the formation of braided channels.
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]
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.
A wide variety of river and stream channel types exist in limnology, the study of inland waters.All these can be divided into two groups by using the water-flow gradient as either low gradient channels for streams or rivers with less than two percent (2%) flow gradient, or high gradient channels for those with greater than a 2% gradient.
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]
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]
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 ...
It is common in meandering and braided rivers. In meandering rivers, bifurcations are often unstable in their configuration, and usually result in channel avulsion . [ 1 ] The stability of bifurcation is dependent on the rate of flow of the river upstream as well as the sediment transport of the upper reaches of the branches just after ...