Estimating Sediment Mass Fluxes on Surfaces Sheltered by Live Vegetation

We present a simple model based on already existing and widely used equations for estimating particle mass fluxes on surfaces sheltered by live vegetation. Wind-tunnel measurements of vertical profiles of mass flux in three different dense live plant canopies, and as a function of the spatially averaged skin friction velocity \({u_{\tau }}'\), provide the baseline set of data. For the bare-sand surface, the total mass flux Q shows the typical \(b({u_\tau }' - {u_{\tau t}}')^{3 }\) increase with increasing skin friction velocity \({u_{\tau }}'\), where b is a constant and \({u_{\tau t}}'\) is the threshold at the onset of particle erosion. Similar relations, however, with different values for b and \({u_{\tau t}}'\) compared to the bare-sand surface were found for experiments with 5.25 and 24.5 plants \(\hbox {m}^{-2}\) and can be explained by the spatial variations of \(u_{\tau }\) for the canopy cases. Based on the resulting parameters b and \({u_{\tau t}}'\), which are found to be functions of the roughness density \(\lambda \), we present a final simple relation \(Q(\lambda ,\, {u_{\tau }}')\) used for estimating the total mass flux for surfaces sheltered by live vegetation.