THE ROLE OF HYDROLOGIC DISTURBANCES ON BIOMASS EROSION DYNAMICS: FIRST RESULTS FROM RIVERINE EXPERIMENTS

This paper presents an overview of RIVERINE project (RIver-VEgetation interactions and Reproduction of Island Nuclei formation and Evolution) preliminary results. We show some exemplary statistics of the both eroded and non-eroded material as resulting from a competitive dynamics between vegetation growth time scale and interarrival time of disturbances with constant magnitude. Two experiments, that is within channels with either regular geometry (parallel walls) or converging walls are discussed. Results show coherency of the results between the two geometries as far as the selective erosion mechanism of riparian vegetation is concerned. The experiment with convergent walls also conjectures that island formation is limited by the stream power associated to the local specific discharge.