Untangling the controls on bedload transport in a wood‐loaded river with RFID tracers and linear mixed modelling

摘要: Bedload transport is a fundamental process by which coarse sediment is transferred through landscapes by river networks and may be well described stochastically by distributions of grain step length and rest time obtained through tracer studies. To date, none of these published tracer studies have specifically investigated the influence of large wood in the river channel on sediment transport dynamics, limiting the applicability of stochastic sediment transport models in these settings. Large wood is a major component of many forested rivers and is increasing due to anthropogenic ‘Natural Flood Management’ (NFM) practices. This study aims to investigate and model the influence of large wood on grain‐scale bedload transport. We tagged 957 cobble to pebble sized particles (D50 = 73 mm) and 28 pieces of large wood (> 1 m in length) with radio frequency identification (RFID) tracers in an alpine mountain …