STUDY AREA
2.1 General description of the study
area
The
Yellow River is the second longest river in China and is well known
worldwide for its high sediment load; it has a total length of 5,464 km,
and its basin drainage area amounts to 795,000 km2, as
shown in Figure 1. The LYR, with a
length of approximately 785.6 km, extends from Mengjin in Henan
Province to Lijin in Shandong
Province and has been divided into three reaches in terms of
geomorphological features, namely, the braided reach, the transitional
reach and the meandering
reach (see Figure
1).
Heavy soil erosion on the Loess Plateau has led to intense sedimentation
in the LYR (Miao, Yang, Chen, & Gao, 2012),
and the total depositional volume in
the LYR was approximately 5.52×109m3 during the period from 1950 to 1999 based on
observational data, of which 60% was deposited in the braided reach
(Xia et al., 2010). The main effect of the heavy sedimentation in the
LYR has been the obvious shrinkage of the main channel accompanied by a
sharp decrease in the flood discharge capacity, which has resulted in
the phenomenon of a secondary suspended river in certain reaches and a
flood risk to the local residents and river management.