Abstract
River drainage networks are important landscape features that have been studied for several decades from a range of geomorphological and hydrological perspectives. However, identifying the most vital (critical) nodes on river networks and analyzing their relationships with geomorphic and climatic properties have not yet been extensively addressed in the literature. In this study, we use an algorithm that determines the set of critical nodes whose removal results in maximum network fragmentation and apply it to various topologies of simulated and natural river networks. Specifically, we consider simulated river networks obtained from optimal channel network (OCN) approach as well as extracted networks from several natural basins across the United States. Our results indicate a power-law relationship between the number of connected node pairs in the remaining network and the number of removed critical nodes. We also investigate the characteristics of sub-basins resulted from the removal of critical nodes and compare them with those of central nodes (in the context of betweenness centrality) for both natural basins and OCNs with varying energy exponent γ to understand vulnerability and resilience of river networks under potential external disruptions.
Highlights
River drainage networks are important landscape features that have been studied for several decades from a range of geomorphological and hydrological perspectives
Since all river networks investigated here are trees, we demonstrate that the considered critical node identification problem is equivalent to the problem of finding a group of nodes with the highest group betweenness centrality[42], which can be interpreted as a quantitative measure of the role of a group of nodes as intermediaries in the process monitoring and control of flow in a network[43,44,45]
The optimal channel network (OCN) recreate several topologic and geometric properties commonly observed in real river networks
Summary
River drainage networks are important landscape features that have been studied for several decades from a range of geomorphological and hydrological perspectives. We use an algorithm that determines the set of critical nodes whose removal results in maximum network fragmentation and apply it to various topologies of simulated and natural river networks. River networks depend on external forcings such as climate and tectonics[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12] These dendritic networks serve as primary pathways for transport of sediment, water, and other environmental fluxes and provide necessary ecosystems to a variety of ecologic and biotic activities[13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. We investigate the locations of the most influential nodes obtained from both critical nodes and central nodes approaches and their role on the generation of sub-basins via fragmentation of river network topology for various simulated and real river networks
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