Form and stability of step‐pool channels: Research progress
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research examining the hydraulics, morphology, and stability of step‐pool mountain streams has blossomed in the last decade, resulting in more than a dozen dissertations. These, along with other research projects, have transformed our understanding of step‐pool channels. Contributions have been made toward understanding depositional step formation and destruction, scour downstream of steps, step‐pool hydraulics, and the effect of sediment transport on step stability. We propose that depositional steps exist in a jammed state whereby the boulders are structurally arranged within the channel and thereby stabilize it. Once a step has formed, a scour pool with a characteristic length and depth develops downstream, creating a zone where additional steps are unlikely to occur. Downstream of the scour hole, steps are more likely to occur as the high energy associated with the plunge pool has dissipated. Data suggest that the presence of cobbles or boulders limits pool scour as well as the degree to which well‐defined, channel‐spanning step‐pools form. We propose a state‐space for step‐pools in which conditions for a step to form include (1) the ratio between width and boulder diameter (the jamming ratio), (2) the ratio between applied shear stress and the stress needed to mobilize the bed (relative Shields number), and (3) the ratio between bed material supply and discharge (bed sediment concentration). Available data suggest this model is plausible. Emerging critical research questions are discussed.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it