Flow Resistance in Lowland Rivers Impacted by Distributed Aquatic Vegetation

This study addressed a research concern that employing a fixed value for the bed roughness coefficient in lowland rivers (mostly sand-bed rivers) is deemed practically questionable in the presence of a mobile bed and time-dependent changes in vegetation patches. Accordingly, we set up 45 cross-sections in four lowland streams to investigate seasonal flow resistance values within a year. The results revealed that the significant sources of boundary resistance in lowland rivers with the lower regime flow were bed forms and aquatic vegetation. The study then used flow discharge as an influential variable reflecting the impacts of the above-mentioned sources of resistance to flow. The studied approach ended up with two new flow resistance predictors which simply connected the dimensionless unit discharge to flow resistance factors, Darcy-Weisbach (f) and Manning (n) coefficients. A comparison of the computed and measured flow resistance values also indicated that 87–89% of the data sets were within ± 20% error bands. The flow resistance predictors were also verified against large independent sets of field and flume data. The obtained predictions using the developed predictors might overestimate flow resistance factors by 40% for other lowland rivers. Based on a different view, according to the findings of this research, seasonal variation of vegetation abundance could show the augmentation in flow resistance values, both f and n, in low summer flows when vegetation covers river bed and side banks. The highest amount of flow resistance was observed during the summer period, during the July–August period.