Smart Rivers: Instrumenting watercourses to measure transport processes and assess risk

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River hydraulics is an active area of research for a number of reasons including: pressures from urbanization and climate change on surface water networks; limitations in experimental and numerical approaches to longstanding problems like sediment transport; and technical advances that open up new possibilities. The proposed research aims to exploit new techniques to gain better information about how and when the building blocks of river structure, i.e. the stored wood and sediment, move in rivers. The rationale is that this information could be exploited to better assess risk. For instance, when wood and sediment move during floods, scour is occurring, bed elevations are changing, and the risk of wood jams or instability at built infrastructure such as bridges and sewers is elevated. Measuring movement and communicating that information in a timely manner could be used to facilitate rapid response. At time scales of years or decades, trends in sediment and wood movement underpin structural imbalances in river networks that can result from external forces such as urbanization and climate change. Network modelling tools are needed to put the right information into the hands of land-use planners and practicing engineers.