The shape of watersheds.
other
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 30224698.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-018-06210-4 and PMC identifier 6141598.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Since the 1950s river networks have been intensely researched in geosciences and hydrology. This led to the definition of scaling laws that described the organisation of landscapes under fluvial incision and were later explored by statistical physics and fractal mathematics. The emblematic Hack's Law proposes a power-law relationship between watershed area and main stream length. Though extensively documented, a wide range of values is still reported for Hack's parameters. Some authors associate this dispersion to local geologic and climatic conditions. Here based on the analysis of large sets of river basins in various climatic and geological settings, we confirm the geometric similarity of river networks. We demonstrate that basin shape is mostly related to Hack's coefficient and not to the exponent, independently of external forcing such as lithology and pluviometry.