Current progress in quantifying and monitoring instream large wood supply and transfer in rivers

Ruiz-Villanueva, Virginia; Aarnink, Janbert; Ghaffarian, Hossein; Gibaja del Hoyo, Javier; Finch, Bryce; Hortobágyi, Borbála; Vuaridel, Marceline; Piégay, Hervé (2024). Current progress in quantifying and monitoring instream large wood supply and transfer in rivers. Earth surface processes and landforms, 49(1), pp. 256-276. Wiley 10.1002/esp.5765

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Large wood drives both the form and function of gravel-bed rivers draining forested basins. Previously overlooked benefits of wood in rivers are now widely recognized. Together with flow and sediment regimes, the wood regime controls rivers' physical and ecological integrity. Yet large quantities of wood transported during floods can pose additional hazards, potentially damaging infrastructures like bridges or dams and exacerbating flooding. However, unlike the water and sediment regimes intensively studied over the past decades, the instream wood regime or budgeting has been only recently defined and thus is still rarely quantified. The instream wood budget describes the cascading processes from supply or recruitment, entrainment, and transport to deposition, storage and decay (i.e., fragmentation or decomposition). These processes show high spatial and temporal variability but can be characterized by magnitude, frequency, timing, duration and mode. Instream wood budgeting is challenging, primarily because of the lack of observations, monitoring stations, and standardized protocols to acquire data. This contribution reviews the most recent advances to quantify the different instream wood budget components, notably the wood supply, and transfer. Case studies showing applications of biogeochemistry, videography, artificial intelligence, numerical modelling or tracking illustrate the current progress. Because critical challenges remain, we identify and describe some of them and discuss how the wood in riverine sciences may develop in the future.

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