On the retreat of forested, cohesive riverbanks

Data from the Brandywine Creek in Pennsylvania and the South River in Virginia document spatial and temporal patterns describing the retreat of gently curving bends with forested riparian zones containing a mix of very large and smaller trees, cohesive banks, and slow rates of migration (∼ 0.1 m/yr). Field data include 2.5 years of bank profile surveys, measurements of tree morphology, and ground-based laser scanner (LiDAR) surveys repeated biannually. These banks retreat through a cycle of erosion on decadal timescales. Initially, small volumes (mean = 0.173 m3 per bank erosion event) of soil are removed between large trees growing on the bank. Near trees, the rate of bank retreat is initially negligible, creating a scalloped bank morphology buttressed by large trees. As the trees are increasingly exposed to the flow, they become slowly undercut, gradually leaning into the channel and sliding down to the toe of the bank, eventually toppling into the river after a few years, which restarts the cycle. A magnitude–frequency analysis of monitoring data from the Brandywine Creek indicates that the effective bank erosion event only 0.11 m3; thus, forested bank retreat is dominated by small soil failures. Large erosion events, many associated with trees toppling into the river, greatly increase the variance of time-averaged rates of bank erosion, such that almost 4 years of monitoring are needed to measure time-averaged rates of erosion to within an accuracy of 10%. Because of the limited spatial extent of our survey data and the absence of large discharges, these results are provisional. Improved process-based models to predict the retreat of forested riverbanks should account for the spatial structure of riparian forests and the interactions between the flow, the gradual removal of bank soils, and the ongoing efforts of the trees to remain attached to the bank.