LWDsimR: Simulation of Woody Debris Dynamics during Floods

Large woody material transported by rivers during floods can be jammed in naturally or artificially narrowed stream sections. This often leads to a dramatically increase of the destructive power of the flood and can cause severe damages and high costs. Since direct observation of these processes are difficult and rare, numeric modelling is a promising alternative.The presented model “LWDsimR” is an adaption of the model of Mazzorana et. al. (2011) and enables a vector based and object-oriented simulation of the woody debris dynamics during floods on the basis of irregular meshes and hydrodynamic 2D models. Mobilization, transport, deposition and entrapment of the woody material can be modeled with temporal and spatial high resolution. This allows the identification of possible recruitment areas, transport pathways, deposition areas and critical stream configuration for log jams as well as an estimation of the expected volume of the woody material.

The software is written in R and scripts for preprocessing and postprocessing of the data are available. For detailed information about the model set up and application please see the user manual. For a detailed description of the transport equations and further information please see Mazzorana et al. (2011). For informations about the vector based version in R please refer to Galatioto (2016).

The updated version 2 includes an adapted modelling approach of the woody material recruitment process. This allows an enhanced estimation of the woody debris load actually recruited during a flood event.