Fig 1.
Are these all meandering river types?
See text for explanation. Images sourced from the personal photograph archives of the authors. Reproduced with their permission. (A, D) Kirstie Fryirs, (B, C) Gary Brierley.
Fig 2.
Are these all braided river types?
See text for explanation. Basemaps produced with ArcGIS® software by Esri. Sources: Esri, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus DS, USDA, USGS, AeroGRID, IGN, and the GIS User Community.
Fig 3.
Are these all anabranching river types?
See text for explanation. Basemaps produced with ArcGIS software by Esri. Sources: Esri, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus DS, USDA, USGS, AeroGRID, IGN, and the GIS User Community.
Fig 4.
River Styles procedural tree for identifying different river types across the spectrum of river diversity.
The approach identifies types of river based on a mix of measures including valley setting, channel planform, geomorphic units and bed material texture. Modified from [29] and reproduced under a CC BY license, with permission from Wiley, original copyright 2005.
Fig 5.
Naming convention for river types.
The approach is matched to the River Styles procedural tree (Fig 4) and produces full and abbreviated names. (A) for confined valley setting, (B) for partly confined valley setting, (C) for laterally unconfined valley setting.
Fig 6.
Worked example of how to use the naming convention for a partly confined river.
This example demonstrates how the naming convention is hierarchical and how the approach is used to identify and name a river type. The further through the approach a user gets, the more detail is added to the identification and the name. Example is Williams River, NSW, Australia. Basemaps produced with ArcGIS software by Esri. Sources: Esri, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus DS, USDA, USGS, AeroGRID, IGN, and the GIS User Community.
Fig 7.
Examples of Laterally unconfined, continuous channel, meandering, sand bed rivers where using a geomorphic unit descriptor is useful for further differentiating between variants of this river type.
Table 1.
Some abbreviations for describing types of margn control, river planform, geomorphic units and bed material texture as part of the naming convention.
Note: list of geomorphic units taken from [53], [29] and [19].
Fig 8.
Worked examples of full and abbreviated names for a range of river types across the spectrum of river diversity.
Examples are shown for confined, partly confined and laterally unconfined river types. Basemaps produced with ArcGIS software by Esri. Sources: Esri, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus DS, USDA, USGS, AeroGRID, IGN, and the GIS User Community.
Table 2.
Full and abbreviated names for rivers in Figs 1–3.
For examples of abbreviations to use in names, see Table 1.
Fig 9.
Demonstration of how the naming convention can be used for identifying and naming anthropogenically modified rivers.
Basemaps produced with ArcGIS software by Esri. Sources: Esri, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus DS, USDA, USGS, AeroGRID, IGN, and the GIS User Community.