Despite watershed damage, pollution and the construction of various kinds of barrier, rivers continue to carry figurative freight in the late twentieth century. This dissertation reads a number of contemporary texts (personal essays, fiction and poetry) that focus on rivers and insist upon contextual, literary and ethical processes of river reflection. The Introduction sites such writing in cycles of recirculation involving author, watershed and community. Chapter One takes up these issues, looking at essays by Lance Kinseth, Scott Russell Sanders, Joan Didion, Edward Abbey (Down The River, 1982) and Kathleen Dean Moore (Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water, 1995), examining questions of memory, ecological change and the limits of language and observation, in order to demonstrate some links between subject and meandering form. Chapter Two records how, by troping the river as a site of revision and healing, Barry Lopez, David James Duncan and Richard Flanagan localise versions of philosopher Hans Jonas's "imperative of responsibility." In part, Duncan's The River Why (1982) and Flanagan's Death of a River Guide (1993) braid personal or regional neo-colonial memory to call Lopez's River Notes (1979) to account. Chapters Three and Four then read the psychic, political and ecological reach of the 'fallen river' through Ivan Illich's commentary on water. Analysis of further fiction by Duncan and Flanagan provides a context for a consideration of Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water (1993) and a discussion of literary representations of the effect of large dams on indigenous communities and the natural environment. By extension, Cormac McCarthy's Suttree (1979) and London psychogeographer Iain Sinclair's Downriver (1991) track two distinct urban riverscapes (by the Tennessee and Thames), figuring them, in Sinclair's words, as "ribbons of memory" in an age of amnesiac capital accumulation. Chapter Five marks ways in which globalisation, loss, memory, form and line transpire through poetry by Tim Bowling and Daphne Marlatt (Steveston, 1974/1984) at the Fraser River; it then re-reads Richard Hugo as a riverscape poet. Finally, a discussion of long poems by Jim Harrison, Don McKay, Gary Snyder and Liz Zetlin leads to a conclusion that emphasises exchange and possibility. The practice of reading written texts inherently invokes a challenge to 'read a river' more attentively. At the cultural (and thus ecological) watershed, memory constitutes a process of contemporary river reflection, which is distinguished by its sense of provisionality, loss and fragile continuity.

An examination was carried out to determine the conveyance behaviour of overbank flow in meandering two-stage channel systems. Eleven influential parameters were identified namely sinuosity, aspect ratio, cross-sectional shape and bank slope of the main channel, relative boundary roughness of floodplain to main channel, floodplain longitudinal slope, meander belt width relative to floodplain width, sinuosity of the floodplain bank, relative overbank flow depth, system scale and lateral slope of the floodplain. The first ten of the eleven parameters were examined. Observations were made of the coherent flow structure of the floodplain and main channel systems, which influences energy losses. The effect of each of the influential parameters is quantified through a non-dimensional discharge function <I>F</I>^* which is the ratio of the actual discharge in a two-stage channel to a theoretical discharge aggregated for three cross-section zones, the main channel, the floodplain within the meandering channel and the floodplain outside the meander belt. The effect of each parameter on the energy losses in meandering two-stage channel flows for the case involving straight floodbanks and a floodplain without cross-fall are analysed in terms of Darcy-Weisbach resistance coefficients using the Prandt-von Karman resistance relationship and treating the system as a whole. Flow domains are defined in the first of which viscosity and roughness are influential and in the second flow resistance is independent of viscosity. A design approach is presented for predicting the conveyance capacity in each of these domains and is based on small-scale data obtained at the Universities of Aberdeen and Glasgow and large-scale data from the UK Flood Channel Facility (UK-FCF). This approach was applied to the available independent laboratory data along with the James and Wark (1992) method. The author's approach was found to give good predictions of conveyance capacity. This approach was also applied to River Roding field data. The floodplain roughness which varies throughout the year and is difficult to estimate, is shown to be the most significant source of energy loss and is environmentally sensitive in natural meandering two-stage rivers.

A major difficulty encountered by river engineers is the unavailability of a reliable relationship between the flow discharge and the sediment transport rate. Most of the published transport rate prediction methods have been developed using measurements of uniformly sized sediment. It has been found that non-uniformly sized sediment exhibits very different behaviour from that of single sized sediment. If no sediment is introduced into a reach then as the bed degrades coarse material progressively accumulates on the surface, significantly reducing the transport rate. This can be effectively reduced to zero, the bed is then said to be armoured. Four experiments were conducted, in which there was no feed or recirculation of sediment and the flow rate was held constant. These experiments indicated a two phase development during the formation of an armour layer. The initial phase was dominated by the rapid coarsening of the bed surface with a large drop in the sediment transport rate, followed by a second longer phase characterised by the re-arrangement of the surface into a stable grain layout. Numerical simulations were carried out using a mixing layer model. Comparison of the simulated and observed development of transport rate bedload and bed surface composition with time indicated that processes other than grain size sorting were important. Two further experiments were carried out in which the re-arrangement of the bed surface and the adjustment of the near bed flow environment was investigated. This work presents experimental evidence that mixed grain size transport is controlled by a series of inter-related physical processes. All the important parameters such as bed surface composition and grain arrangement, the near bed flow field and the amount and composition of the bedload need to be considered if a mixed grain transport system is to be simulated successfully.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1938. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-283). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Thesis (M.S. - Renewable Natural Resources)--University of Arizona, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-124).

Thesis (doctoral)--Philipp-Universität zu Marburg.

Inaug.-Dissertation--Kiel. / Lebenslauf.

Thesis (M.S.)--Wisconsin. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-100).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 199-225).

Inaug.-Diss. - Königsberg i. Pr. / Includes bibliographical references.