Large in-stream wood yield during an extreme flood (Storm Alex, October 2020, Roya Valley, France): Estimating the supply, transport, and deposition using GIS

Abstract

During major floods, rivers erode their banks and thus recruit large wood pieces from the riparian zones. There is still a lack of knowledge about the transport of large wood, the volumes involved and the flux distribution, i.e. the large wood connectivity at catchment scale. During storm Alex (October 2020), the French Roya catchment (394 km2) experienced a paroxysmal morphogenic flood involving massive bank erosion. The riparian vegetation was largely recruited, with large wood contributing to logjams and bridge destruction. This paper presents a methodology for volumetric assessment of the large wood fluxes involved. Simple approaches are used to (i) quantify the inputs from stand density data from the national forest inventory and from source areas based on diachronic analysis of active channels highlighting the erosion of 87 ha of wooded areas; and (ii) quantify the volumes deposited via an exhaustive manual digitisation of 16,846 pieces of large wood deposited on 59 km of channels on the Roya and its tributaries. This catchment-scale, large wood connectivity analysis shows that the flood recruited and transported downstream a volume of around 14,000 m3 of large wood (uncertainty range: 7000–29,500 m3). Drone observations of the Roya River mouth in Italy and satellite images showing a raft of driftwood, several km long, drifting off the Roya River mouth in the aftermath of the flood corroborate our findings.