Quantitative relationships between river and channel-belt planform patterns

Abstract Channel planform patterns arise from internal dynamics of sediment transport and fluid flow in rivers are affected by external controls such as valley confinement. Understanding whether these channel preserved the rock record has critical implications for our ability to constrain past environmental conditions. Rivers belts, which one most ubiquitous accessible parts sedimentary record, yet relationship between river channel-belt remains unquantified. We analyzed belts 30 systems globally. were classified using a graph theory-based metric, Entropic Braided Index (eBI), quantifies number channels considering partitioning water discharge. find that, after normalizing size, width wavelength, amplitude, curvature belt edges decrease with increasing (eBI). Active single-channel occupies little 1% belt, while multichannel it can occupy >50% belt. Moreover, we that lie along continuum numbers. Our findings have studies on floodplain interaction, storage timescales sediment, paleoenvironmental reconstruction.