River Architect

Analyze and design fluvial ecosystems.

River Architect supports river engineers and ecologists in planning habitat-enhancing river design features: their expected lifespans, their required dimensions, where they belong in the terrain, and what they are worth ecologically.

Geoprocessing runs on GDAL (through rasterio, numpy and scipy) and map production runs on QGIS print layouts; River Architect runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

The methods are documented in:

Where to start

Software setup

install it, and what it needs

Usage (Quick Start)

run it - the worked example, the API in a page, and the interface

Get started, terminology and signposts

prepare a condition: the step everything else depends on

Modules

the analyses themselves

The interface can walk you through it

Help ▸ Live Guide: Example opens a seven-step walkthrough of the sample reach inside the program: it sets the project directory to the sample data, and each step brings the tab it talks about to the front. The same content is at The worked example: the whole chain on the sample reach.

Migrating from the ArcGIS version?

Migrating from arcpy maps every arcpy operation in v1 used onto its open-source equivalent, and documents the semantic differences that silently produce wrong results if you port code naively: implicit extent alignment, what a two-argument Con() does on its false branch, and the fidelity gaps found by running the whole chain.

Contents

What it does

Lifespan and design mapping predicts how long a restoration feature will survive as a function of terrain change, morphology and 2D hydrodynamic results, and what dimensions it needs to be stable - for example the minimum size of angular boulders that will not mobilise in a flood. Max Lifespan then compares features and reports which one belongs at each cell.

Morphology (Terraforming) lowers the terrain where a planned planting cannot reach the water table, and compares pre- and post-project elevation models to quantify the earth movement a design requires. Volumes are integrated under the triangulated surface, so quantities stay comparable with the original software.

Ecohydraulics evaluates habitat suitability over a range of discharges and integrates it into a single seasonal habitat area, identifies wetted areas that become disconnected as flows recede - which is where fish strand - and maps where riparian seedlings can establish.

Mapping renders results into publication-quality PDF map series through QGIS print layouts, with multi-page reach series driven by a QGIS atlas.

Citing

Schwindt, S., Larrieu, K., Pasternack, G.B., Rabone, G. (2020). River Architect. SoftwareX 11, 100438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2020.100438

Indices