When HEC hired me to add sediment transport to HEC-RAS almost 20 years ago now, I inherited a set of sediment transport functions that were mostly developed in the early to mid 20th century.
These were – and continue to be – important equations.
But when I sat down with the RAS team
To talk about the new science I was excited to include in a river mechanics model.
I pulled out the same binder I brought to this interview

We are wrapping up our third season of the podcast, and our three-part mini series on gravel bed rivers And talking to the scientist who wrote all the papers in that binder, seems like a fitting way to wrap up both.

Dr. Peter Wilcock spent much of his career at Johns’ Hopkins, where he and his team developed the Wilcock and Crowe transport equation and did some of the most important gravel bed transport work that was hitting the journals when I was coming of age in the field.

Peter is unquestionably one of the most important contemporary contributors to quantitative gravel-bed transport science and engineering.
He won the American Society of Civil Engineers Hans Albert Einstein award in 2008 and is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

And we talked a lot about that fundamental, early work, that is just kind of part of established gravel bed transport theory these days.

But 10 years ago he moved to Utah State, improving his proximity to classic gravel bed rivers, and in the years since I put that binder together of his paradigm shifting work,
Peter has been very intentional about translating his science into practical channel design methods, particularly for restoration channel designs.

So we talked about both…starting out with more of the channel design topics and then moving into his classic findings.

The Link to Peter's Stream Assessment and Design Class Materials (including iSURF) that we talk about is here:
https://qcnr.usu.edu/wats/programs/short-courses/sediment-transport/course-materials-2022

We also talk about Ron Copeland's channel design method. We made a short video with Ron on that method which is good background for this episode here:
https://youtu.be/ykJ3FA39p0g
Ron's podcast is here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ron-copeland-on-analytical-channel-design-the-laursen/id1650989239?i=1000587444097

Finally, we also have an interview with Joanna Curran (the Crowe in Wilcock and Crowe) which makes a good companion to this episode here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/joanna-curran-on-gravel-bed-rivers-wilcock-and-crowe/id1650989239?i=1000589529286

This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Mike Loretto edited the episode and wrote and performed the music.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

Dr. Power is a food web ecologist at UC Berkeley, where she leads the Power lab which has compiled careful, long term data sets in the Angelo Reserve in Northern CA.

In addition to her early work, in Panama and the Ozarks - which we touch on briefly - Dr. Power’s multi-decadal data sets on the Eel River, have yielded remarkable findings about how food webs function in gravel bed rivers…and spoiler alert, it sometimes involves the sorts of things we tend to talk about here…like the gravel - and how it transports.

While this is a physical science podcast, I hoped to include interviews with river Ecologists from the beginning particularly ecologists who make careful observations
at that interface of physical and biological processes. And I always hoped I could kick that emphasis off with Dr. Power.

I teach an Ecogeomorphology module in one of our classes here at HEC and I always lead that with the Eel river story she shares About 20 minutes into this episode.
That Eel river story was one of the early influences that got me interested in the ecological interactions with river mechanics processes.

I also asked Mary about a couple of Ecological models and categories, that have corollaries in geomorphology. So we talked about disturbance, alternative stable states as well as the Box model and the Ideal Free Distribution, which are just really helpful ideas for anyone who is interested in rivers.

Dr. Power was induced into the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.

Links:
Serengeti Rules:
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/serengeti-rules-dhbtnm/19906/
Disturbance and Recover of Algal Assemblage on OK Stream
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2425975
Resource Enhancement: Armored Catfish, Algae, and Sediment
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1937361

Episode Photo: Eel River

This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Mike Loretto edited the episode and wrote and performed the music.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

Dr Alain Recking has quantified gravel bed transport with just about all the tools available to our discipline.

In addition to substantial field work- Dr. Recking has done some important and influential flume experiments.

We have talked and will talk about hiding and armoring quite a bit in this podcast, because they are difficult ideas, that are hard to measure and simulate, and critical to gravel bed processes.

But Dr. Recking’s contributions to this vertical sorting conversation destabilizes armoring theory a bit…kind of literally,

He found that in high gradient channels, at equilibrium flows, vertical sorting doesn’t necessarily reach an equilibrium, but can be episodic, which is important because it leads to the pulsed transport processes.

And the story he tells about how he discovered this...is just kind of narrative science at its very best.

The other characteristic of Alain’s work that I think is remarkable is his a knack for pulling together immense data sets (often including substantial data from the American West) in order to pose important quantitative questions on the meta-analyses scale.

And so we talked about how this lead to his gravel-bed flow-resistance work and – what I consider – the most important sediment transport equation, since the Parker/Wilcock-Crowe generation of innovation.

We also talk about Bedload Web, where he has collected many of the measurements he used to to these analyses: https://en.bedloadweb.com/

Dr. Recking works for INRAE – The French National Research Institute of Agriculture, Food, and Environment a research consortium focused on sustainable development in those arenas.

This week, on the RSM River Mechanics podcast, we talk high gradient sorting, quantitative meta-analyses with Alain Recking.

We also posted videos clips with his experiments here: https://youtu.be/jKFlMAkD7qo

This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Mike Loretto edited the episode and wrote and performed the music.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248