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Meander cutoffs directly reduce and tend to indirectly reduce a river’s sinuosity, thus straightening out a river’s channel. [5] Understanding the processes that form meander cutoffs can allow one to predict how a river will evolve in the future which is important for agricultural businesses and controlling future floods. [5]
Hydrogeomorphology has been defined as “an interdisciplinary science that focuses on the interaction and linkage of hydrologic processes with landforms or earth materials and the interaction of geomorphic processes with surface and subsurface water in temporal and spatial dimensions.” [1] The term 'hydro-geomorphology’ designates the study of landforms caused by the action of water. [2]
Fluvial geomorphology is the cumulation of a number of sciences including open channel hydraulics, sediment transport, hydrology, physical geology, and riparian ecology. River engineering practitioners attempt to understand fluvial geomorphology, implement a physical alteration, and maintain public safety.
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 channel type developed depends on stream gradient, riparian vegetation and sediment supply. Braided rivers tend to occur on steeper gradients where there is a large supply of sediment for braid bars , while single thread sinuous channels occur where there is a lower sediment supply for point bars .
Channel straightening and levee construction eliminate these areas of deposition, creating unfavorable conditions for riparian vegetation recruitment. By preventing overbank flooding, levees reduce the amount of water available to riparian vegetation in the floodplain, which alters the types of vegetation that can persist in these conditions. [2]
Channel patterns are found in rivers, streams, and other bodies of water that transport water from one place to another.Systems of branching river channels dissect most of the sub-aerial landscape, each in a valley proportioned to its size.
After the river channel was straightened, 40,000 acres (160 km 2) of floodplain below Lake Kissimmee dried out, reducing the quality of waterfowl habitat by ninety percent, and the number of herons, egrets and wood storks by two-thirds. Catches of largemouth bass in the river were consistently worse after the channelization.