Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2006VT25B

Evaluating Quantitative Models of Riverbank Stability

Institute: Vermont
Year Established: 2006 Start Date: 2006-03-01 End Date: 2008-02-29
Total Federal Funds: $37,679 Total Non-Federal Funds: $121,390

Principal Investigators: Mandar Dewoolkar, Paul Bierman

Project Summary: The Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation recognizes that streambank erosion could be one of the most important nonpoint sources of sediment and phosphorus entering streams, rivers, and lakes, and thus one of the largest contributors to the impairment of surface water quality and aquatic habitat in Vermont. The Lake Champlain Basin Program also considers streambank erosion to be a potentially important source of phosphorus loading to Lake Champlain. Therefore, it is only logical that Vermont as well as other states are expending significant funds and effort to control streambank erosion. In Vermont, decisions concerning which stream banks require restoration are typically based on the States fluvial geomorphic model, which is comprised of three increasingly detailed, however still mostly qualitative, assessment phases. The objective of the proposed study is to gain a fundamental understanding of physics and mechanics of riverbank instability in Vermont. We propose to leverage the existing research data base and findings at UVM and ongoing efforts at the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources in order to identify critical sites for our investigation. We plan to collaborate with the State in identifying additional sites of particular interest. Our quantitative evaluation will be based on in-depth geotechnical analysis of bank stability in order to understand and thus be able to predict what makes some banks stable and other banks fail over both time and changing river and groundwater conditions. The resulting quantitative models will be able to account for stream aggradation, degradation and changing flow conditions explicitly. They will incorporate measured soil strength parameters as well as real bank geometries and failure processes observed in the field, a major advance over the current state of knowledge. The semi-quantitative evaluation will be similar; however, soil strength parameters will be empirically correlated to index properties (such as grain size), which are cheaper and less time consuming to determine than soil cohesion and friction angle. We will use regression analysis to establish this correlation and to estimate its robustness. Our work should have substantial impact on the understanding of bank stability and sediment input to Vermont streams. Once we understand these processes quantitatively at specific sites, we will then be able to make more broad-ranging predictions of stream and riverbank behavior under a variety of different conditions because we can use models for extrapolating to different sites and changing conditions over time. In particular, we will be able to use our models to predict bank stability response to channel evolution over time and space as well as draw conclusions about erosion hazards. Thus, our work should be applicable far beyond the sites we study and should allow us to make predictions about basin-scale behavior of streambanks, getting at the broader and more important question, where is the sediment coming from! In many cases, this sediment is carrying important pollutants, such as phosphorus.