Short‐term geomorphological and riparian vegetation responses to a 40‐year flood on a braided, dryland river
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In December 2010, a 40‐year flood occurred in the lower Virgin River (SE Nevada, southwestern United States), a braided river segment with riparian vegetation largely dominated by invasive shrubs in the genus Tamarix . We assessed geomorphological and vegetation responses to this large magnitude disturbance event by comparing pre‐ and post‐flood remote sensing and field survey data in four river reaches. Analyses of orthophotos and light detection and ranging‐derived topography showed that both the active channel area and channel width increased between 80% and 258%, representing an increase from 13% to 30% of the total river corridor area. Erosion predominated in the outer bends of the enlarged channel and deposition in the pre‐flood channel, causing local avulsions of the low‐flow channel. Field‐based topographic data recorded before and after the flood in 385 plots also showed that deposition occurred in parts of the floodplain that were not eroded. Two thirds of woody vegetation cover (mainly dominated by Tamarix , with some native shrub Pluchea sericea ) was lost in areas that eroded (~20% of the river corridor). In the remaining ~80% of stable river corridor (aggrading or no change in elevation) Tamarix remained dominant. Following erosion, but also where sediment deposition predominated under the Tamarix canopy, the most common colonizing vegetation in the understory was comprised of annual plants, especially Salsola tragus . Our study supported previous studies describing large floods in braided rivers; we documented the first phase of a cycle of channel widening and increase in vegetation heterogeneity that is commonly followed by narrowing and vegetation homogenization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".