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The loss of biodiversity in freshwater environments is becoming an increasing problem globally. As a result, many tools have been developed and improved to reduce this decline. However, there is still a need for the identification and evaluation of precise restoration measures to improve habitats and preserve sentinel freshwater species, such as brown trout. This paper provides an up‐to‐date viewpoint about the life history, habitat characteristics, suitability conditions, and metapopulation dynamic modelling of brown trout, aiming to identify and discuss gaps and propose possible improvements based on collating and reinterpreting literature data. Results suggest that habitat suitability curves for environmental and hydraulic variables possess some degree of universality, for spawning habitat, fry, juvenile and adult trout. Further, an improved method to estimate the amount of suitable area by including the role of stream obstacles (i.e., macro‐roughness with characteristic size in the order of the mean water depth) is proposed and discussed. This approach can be integrated into advanced metapopulation models and will allow experts to evaluate the best measures towards restoring and preserving freshwater riverine environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The planform morphology of a river reach is the result of the combined actions of sediment motion (erosion, transport and deposition), hydrological regime, development and growth of vegetation. However, the interactions among these processes are still poorly understood and rarely investigated in laboratory flume experiments. In these experiments and also in numerical modelling, vegetation is usually represented by rigid cylinders, although it is widely recognized that this schematization cannot reproduce the effects of root stabilization and binding on riverbed sediment. In this work, we focus on the effects of added vegetation on morphological dynamics of alternate bars in a straight channel by means of flume experiments. We performed laboratory experiments reproducing hydraulic conditions that are typical of gravel bed rivers, in terms of water depth, bed slope and bed load; these conditions led to the formation of freely migrating alternate bars. We then employed rigid vegetation that was deployed on the reproduced alternate bars according to field observations. Various vegetation scenarios, in terms of density and spatial arrangement, were deployed in the flume experiments such to mimic different maintenance strategies. Results show the effects of rigid vegetation on the alternate bar configuration on the overall topographic pattern, the main alternate bar characteristics (such as amplitude and wavelength) and migration rate.

River bars often form at river confluences due to variation in flow discharges or in sediment transport capacity; once these bars are grown, they constitute favourable habitats for vegetation development. In this work, we analysed the effect of vegetation above confluence bars on the hydrodynamics of a river reach. The case study considered is the Arno River reach at the Greve junction, where confluence bars expanded towards the opposite bank. A two‐dimensional hydraulic model was implemented through BASEMENT software varying the flow discharge. Three‐dimensional topographic data were used to generate the calculation mesh. Dendrometric surveys were carried out to describe the current state of the vegetation. Seven different vegetative scenarios were considered for numerical simulations, depending on different vegetation management conditions. Such scenarios are characterised by various plant densities, diameters, heights and species (herbaceous, shrub and arboreal), and, accordingly, different formulations were used to estimate the Manning coefficients. The outcomes of this study illustrate that the denser vegetation settled on confluence bars, the more the backwater effect is emphasised and the more the flow is shifted toward the opposite banks of the confluence thus inducing possible erosion phenomena at the toe of the outer bank. Moreover, the observed large bar extensions are surprising, when considering the mild confluence angle and the very low discharge ratio. We showed that the vegetation may be the key driver of the junction hydrodynamics and that vegetated confluences might not follow the classic hydraulics‐related models which may describe only a formative configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worldwide convectively accelerated streams flowing in downstream‐narrowing river sections show that riverbed vegetation growing on alluvial sediment bars gradually disappears, forming a front beyond which vegetation is absent. We revise a recently proposed analytical model able to predict the expected longitudinal position of the vegetation front. The model was developed considering the steady state approximation of 1‐D ecomorphodynamics equations. While the model was tested against flume experiments, its extension and application to the field is not trivial as it requires the definition of proper scaling laws governing the observed phenomenon. In this work, we present a procedure to calculate vegetation parameters and flow magnitude governing the equilibrium at the reach scale between hydromorphological and biological components in rivers with converging boundaries. We collected from worldwide rivers data of section topography, hydrogeomorphological and riparian vegetation characteristics to perform a statistical analysis aimed to validate the proposed procedure. Results are presented in the form of scaling laws correlating biological parameters of growth and decay from different vegetation species to flood return period and duration, respectively. Such relationships demonstrate the existence of underlying selective processes determining the riparian vegetation both in terms of species and cover. We interpret the selection of vegetation species from ecomorphodynamic processes occurring in convectively accelerated streams as the orchestrated dynamic action of flow, sediment and vegetation characteristics. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth and establishment of riparian vegetation on river bedforms is of hydrological as well as ecological importance as it helps in enhancing spatial heterogeneity and thus the biodiversity of river corridors. Yet, during floods, flow drag and scouring may reduce the rooting length of plants determining plant mortality via uprooting. In order for uprooting to occur, bed scouring must proceed until the rooting length reaches a critical value and drag forces exceed root residual anchorage. Therefore, the critical rooting length of a plant represents a crucial parameter to estimate the probability of plant removal due to flow erosion. However, difficulties in quantifying such length at the field scale have limited so far the performances of biomorphodynamic models for river bed evolution. In this work, we propose to assess the critical rooting length from controlled plant pullout experiments. To this aim, a free‐body model of the forces acting on a flexible plant in a stream at different erosion stages is developed. At incipient uprooting, we conjecture that the root resistance at the critical rooting length equals that of a plant with equal rooting length when pulled out in static conditions. To illustrate our approach, we validate our model on three different data sets obtained from small‐ and real‐scale plant uprooting experiments. A comparison between modeling and experimental observations reveals that the model provides valid results, despite its deterministic approach. The critical rooting lengths are finally used to assess the probability density function of the time to uprooting via a physically based stochastic model. Key Points: We develop a free‐body model to assess the critical rooting length of flexible plants from static pullout experimentsWe validate the model on existing data from small‐scale and field experimentsWe assess the probability density function of time to uprooting for both data sets using a physically based stochastic model [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simulating the morphological adaptation of water systems often requires including the effects of plants on water and sediment dynamics. Physical and numerical models need representing vegetation in a schematic easily-quantifiable way despite the variety of sizes, shapes and flexibility of real plants. Common approaches represent plants as rigid cylinders, but the ability of these schematizations to reproduce the effects of vegetation on morphodynamic processes has never been analyzed systematically. This work focuses on the consequences of representing plants as rigid cylinders in laboratory tests and numerical simulations. New experiments show that the flow resistance decreases for increasing element Reynolds numbers for both plants and rigid cylinders. Cylinders on river banks can qualitatively reproduce vegetation effects on channel width and bank-related processes. A comparative review of numerical simulations shows that Baptist's method that sums the contribution of bed shear stress and vegetation drag, underestimates bed erosion within sparse vegetation in real rivers and overestimates the mean flow velocity in laboratory experiments. This is due to assuming uniform flow among plants and to an overestimation of the role of the submergence ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We apply stochastic-trajectory analysis to derive exact expressions for the mean first-passage times of jump-and-drift transition paths across two or more consecutive thresholds. We perform the analysis of the crossing statistics in terms of dimensionless quantities and show that, for particles starting between two thresholds, such statistics are directly related to the probability of not crossing one threshold and to the splitting probability of crossing the second one. We additionally derive a relationship for the mean first-passage time of the transition paths crossing two consecutive thresholds for particles starting outside them. The results are relevant to several physical and engineering applications including the case of flow discharge in fluvial environments, which is shown.