Colorado State University

For centuries, humans have controlled the dynamics of rivers to varying degrees through river regulation, river training and vegetation management. Modern river management seeks to restore the natural dynamics of rivers without losing control over flood risk and water use. Although this can go hand in hand, the understanding and approaches can be very different, leading to major challenges and debates. Some current research projects with numerical modeling related to the restoration of river morphodynamics and approaches to consider the effect of vegetation are presented. In particular, modelling of vegetation growth and feedback on hydro- and morphodynamics with the BASEveg module of the BASEMENT software, a vegetation recruitment model based on the Windows-of-Opportunity logic to simulate seed recruitment and a new numerical model deploying a Eulerian-Lagrangian approach to track plant seed trajectories and deposition will be discussed.