Development of RiverBox—An ArcGIS Toolbox for River Bathymetry Reconstruction

Abstract

The main purpose of the present research is to develop software for reconstruction of the river bed on the basis of sparse cross-section measurements. The tools prepared should support the process of hydrodynamic model preparation for simulation of river flow. Considering the formats of available data and the requirements of modern modeling techniques, the prepared software is fully integrated with the GIS environment. The scripting language Python 2.7 implemented in ArcGIS 10.5.1 was chosen for this purpose. Two study cases were selected to validate and test the prepared procedures. These are stream reaches in Poland. The first is located on the Warta river, and the second on the Ner river. The data necessary for the whole procedure are: a digital elevation model, measurements of the cross-sections in the form of points, and two polyline layers representing an arbitrary river centerline and river banks. In the presented research the concept of a channel-oriented coordinate system is applied. The elevations are linearly interpolated along the longitudinal and transversal directions. The interpolation along the channel is implemented in three computational schemes linking different tools available in ArcGIS and ArcToolbox. A simplified comparison of memory usage and computational time is presented. The scheme linking longitudinal and spatial interpolation algorithms seems to be the most advantageous.

Analysis of Shear Stress and Stream Power Spatial Distributions for Detection of Operational Problems in the Stare Miasto Reservoir

“…The second plug-in applied is RiverBox, which is a set of geo-processing tools developed in Python by Dysarz [37]. Although the software was designed primarily for reconstruction of a river bed, after preliminary data processing it has been also successfully applied for this reservoir.…”

“…The plug-in includes a number of algorithms for measurement data processing and three algorithms for reconstruction of the bed. These are described in more detail in the quoted publication [37]. The scheme of the third algorithm applied here is presented in Figure 6b.…”

River Bathymetry Model Based on Floodplain Topography

“…To create a three dimensional (3D) bathymetric model composed of isolated linear structures, such as cross-sections, spatial interpolation between these cross-sections must be used. Many different bed reconstruction algorithms are available in the literature [23,24,36,37]. In this Due to the mathematical nature of the proposed model, a new cross-section width of 0-1 [35] must be selected in the first step.…”

“…In the present bathymetric model, the interpolation mechanism introduced by Caviedes-Voullième [23] was used. Several interpolation methods can alternatively be used for this step [24,37,38]. Which of these methods will yield more reliable results remains an open question.…”

Use of GIS Tools in Sustainable Heritage Management—The Importance of Data Generalization in Spatial Modeling

“…This tool accurately creates a spatial pattern of attributes with spatial continuity [87]. Spatial interpolation is found useful in many fields of science, such as: environmental and pollution studies [88][89][90][91], soil science/pedology [92][93][94][95], hydrology [96], bathymetry [97,98], medicine and health studies [99,100], as well as many others. Kriging interpolation is a geostatistical method for estimating values at unmeasured locations, based on empirical spatial structure quantified in a semivariogram model [101].…”