IAHR_Special: Advances and relevance of river monitoring techniques

Only a solid database enables a realistic assessment of the status of a watercourse and the planning of river engineering measures if they are necessary. The process of monitoring in rivers still poses great challenges for research. However, new monitoring methods have been continuously developed and existing ones improved over the past decades. The special session is intended to attract contributions that present innovative methods or relevant experiences in the field of river monitoring.

Integrative monitoring increasingly accompanies modern river engineering projects and is becoming an important basis for the management of rivers. The diverse pressures from different stakeholders mean that river engineering projects today often do not only pursue one specific goal, but want to achieve a positive development for different objectives through innovative approaches. Accompanying monitoring supports the possibilities to better exploit the limits of the individual boundary conditions and is necessary to quantify the success or failure for individual stakeholders. Often, accompanying monitoring is also a prerequisite for the positive approval of innovative methods in hydraulic engineering. In order to even consider new planning approaches, a deeper process understanding is necessary, which is either directly improved by monitoring methods or the data from monitoring are necessary to calibrate physical or numerical models.

For these reasons, there have been more innovations in the scientific field of river monitoring in recent years. In this area, one main focus lies on sediment transport, as there is still a great need for measurement data internationally and sediment management is a topic of increasing importance. In addition, progress has also been made in monitoring basic data such as morphology and flow velocity, which is often accompanied by new methods or improved technical possibilities. Special topics in monitoring, such as direct bed shear stress measurement, monitoring of ship-induced wave action or plastic transport in flowing waters have also been increasingly discussed in recent years.

Sebastian Pessenlehner
Transnational problem analysis and optimization of sediment monitoring on the Austrian-Slovakian-Hungarian Danube

Philipp Gmeiner
Direct bed shear stress measurements with a floating element sensor

Martin Struck
Tracing gravel in the German Upper Rhine using radio acoustic transmitters

Marcel Liedermann
Monitoring and characterization of gravel dunes in the free-flowing Danube River

Rolf Rindler
Bedload transport process monitoring with plate geophones

Sabrina Schwarz
Results of Continuous Sediment Transport Measurements in High-Alpine Regions

Dorian Shire-Peterlechner
Tracing Gravel, Bedload tracing technologies in Austrian alpine streams and their output