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. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Traditionally, the interactions between geomorphic character and aquatic biodiversity have been widely acknowledged, but poorly quantified. However, the coupling of these disciplines is currently rising up legislative and political agendas, such as the European Union Water Framework Directive (EU WFD). The Directive requires Member States to classify rivers into types based on their natural morphology and geomorphic processes, and to link the biota to river types existing under natural conditions. Typing now forms the basis for evaluating environmental sensitivity to river engineering and determining reference conditions for river restoration. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) has adapted the Montgomery and Buffington (1997) channel typology developed in the Pacific Northwest of the USA for use in Scotland. The modified typology identifies eleven distinct channel types (e.g. bedrock, plane-bed, wandering and meandering). In this study, 43 reference condition sites in the upper River Dee catchment in the Cairngorms, Scotland were chosen to determine the geomorphic validity of the proposed typology, and assess whether channel types support a distinct macroinvertebrate community. Agglomerative Hierarchical Cluster Analysis failed to clearly identify eleven channel types based on catchment controls or on physical habitat characteristics. Four clusters were observed based on catchment drivers and six on physical habitat. Boundaries appear to be fuzzy, relating to a collective number of interacting environmental variables, geological discontinuities, and the geographic complexity of a river system. Multivariate ordinations and Analysis of Similarity indicated that macroinvertebrate communities only differed significantly between bedrock and step-pool reaches. A redundancy analysis showed differences in macroinvertebrate abundances among channel types were related to hydraulic, catchment drivers, physical habitat and physico-chemical variables. The results of the study have important implications for the use of geomorphic typologies in predicting aquatic biota.

This study first briefly discusses the Rivers of America series as a whole, with regard to its origin, its plan, and its public acceptance. Next there is a discussion of the volumes about Southern rivers, including an analysis of the authors' qualifications, organization, scope, treatment, reviewer's opinions, and recommendations by library book selection aids of each volume. Incidental treatment is given to the illustrator's qualifications and the general use of art work in the volumes. The summation attempts to show the success or failure of these volumes about Southern rivers to meet the criteria outlined for the series in the prospectus and to indicate some basic changes in the contents, the variety of reviewers' attitudes through the years, and the importance of these books as Southern regional writing. / Typescript. / "August, 1959." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Louise Galloway, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-59).

This thesis develops and tests a classification of ‘near-natural’ European single-thread rivers, which are free to adjust to fluvial processes. The research involves subdividing rivers along a continuum of geomorphological characteristics to assign river reaches to geomorphologically-meaningful classes according to their channel dimensions and forms, and floodplain characteristics. The classification was developed and tested through three research components. First, a preliminary classification was developed using information entirely derived from a new information system containing remotely-sensed imagery and digital terrain data: Google Earth. This research stage required the development of rules for identifying, extracting and standardising information from this source for a large sample of river reaches. 221 single-thread river reaches distributed across 75 European rivers were investigated. Analysis of the derived information resulted in the development of a classification comprising six classes of European single thread river. Second, the robustness of the classification was explored including assessments of (i) the degree to which the classes were interpretable in relation to the geomorphic features they displayed; (ii) the degree to which sub-divisions of the six classes could be identified and justified; (iii) the accuracy of some specific types of information extracted from Google Earth; and (iv) the degree to which the six classes corresponded to expected gradients in two controlling variables: stream power and bed sediment calibre. Thirdly, bar theory was applied to a sample of rivers representative of the six classes. Since bars are an important contributor to river channel form and dynamics, the correspondence of the bars in the six river classes to their expected distribution as indicated by bar theory, provided further confirmation of the robustness of the classification. The outputs of the research are (i) a fully-tested classification of European single-thread rivers; and (ii) a demonstration of how Google Earth can provide valuable information for research in fluvial geomorphology. Some additional future research stages are proposed that could turn the classification into an operational tool in the context of river assessment and management.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (M.S. - Hydrology and Water Resources)--University of Arizona. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-129).

Thèse - Universit́e de Paris. / "Bibliographie": p. [189]-191.

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The objective of this research was to investigate the sediment behaviour in a compound channel and, in particular, the transfer of sediment between a main channel and its flood plain. A review of the literature on compound channels showed that, whilst research on fixed boundaries had been carried out or was in hand, there was no evidence that the loose boundary situation had previously been studied.Experiments were conducted in a loose boundary, outdoor sand channel of symmetrical compound section. The channel was of straight alignment, 50 m long, with an overall width of 3 m. Pumping equipment was available for recirculation of the water and the sediment.Samples of suspended sediment were collected from the shallow and deep sections and analysed by Coulter Counter to obtain the particle size distributions. The distribution curves were found to be very similar for the main channel and the flood plains.Sand from the channel was labelled by fluorescent dye and inserted in the bed of the main channel so as to simulate a point release. Bed samples were collected at sections 5 m and 10 m downstream of the injection point and examined under UV light for their tracer proportions. It was found that the cross-sectional distribution of tracer concentration was approximately Gaussian indicating that there had been some sediment transfer to the flood plains.A two-dimensional diffusion model, which accounts for the movement in the longitudinal and lateral directions, has been applied to describe the transport and dispersion of the tracer particles. A best-fit overlay with the experimental results enabled the longitudinal and lateral dispersion coefficients to be established. The model results, for the distribution of tracer, are depicted in 2 and 3-dimensional form at a sequence of time intervals for up to 2 hours after tracer release.It was concluded that under steady state conditions there would be a constant transfer of sediment from the main channel to the flood plains; in fact, analysis showed that approximately 40% of a continuous tracer injection in the main channel would be transferred to the flood plains.