Dr.  Dong  Xu
Tianjin University,  China

Title: Planform evolution of meandering rivers and its coupling with vegetation dynamics

Abstract:

Some paleogeographic studies believe that the remarkable development of the meandering river in the middle period of the Paleozoic is closely related to the prosperity of terrestrial vegetation. The terrestrial vegetation has significant effects on river sedimentation and planform evolution of meandering rivers. The growth of riparian vegetation is also affected by rivers. Rivers provide water and nutrients to affect riparian vegetation, involving multiple physical and biological processes. Numerical simulations were carried out by coupling submodels for river flow hydrodynamics, morphology dynamics and also riparian vegetation dynamics. Simulation results show that under the influence of vegetation dynamic factors, the distribution of wavelength and skewness of the meandering river increase, while the distribution of fatness decrease; the density of vegetation shows a scattered distribution pattern when coupled with river dynamic rather than  a strip-like distribution when the river channel is fixed. A Vegetation-River Coupling factor (VRC) was proposed based on the simulation results and natural rivers are found can be classified into three types according to the vegetation-river coupling factor.

Biography:

Dong Xu. He has been a Marie Curie Fellow under the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union and worked as research fellow in Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom. He is an Associated Professor in Department of Port, Coastal and Offshore Engineering of Tianjin University, China. He is also a member of State Key Laboratory of Hydraulic Engineering Simulation and Safety. His research interests involves sediment transport in river and coastal environment and fluvial morphology. In 2016, Dr Xu was awarded a prize by the Supercomputer Center of China because of his outstanding application of High Performance Computing in simulation for flow and sediment transport.