ABSTRACT:

INFLECT is a Python tool for identifying persistent topographic features of river corridors, such as channel banks and floodplain terraces, using topography as the only input data source. INFLECT uses cross-sections derived from a digital elevation model (DEM) to identify inflections in cross-section width, which are indicative of topographic features. Inputs to INFLECT are a DEM, a river thalweg/centerline, and a set of transects spanning the study reach. Outputs include a series of diagnostic figures, a set of elevations representing major topographic feature locations on the study reach, and a shapefile of topographic feature locations along the input transects.

ABSTRACT:

This resource contains channel geometry data for two rivers used to test INFLECT, a tool for automatic detection of longitudinal river corridor topographic features such as baseflow and active channels, tops of banks, and floodplains. The INFLECT codebase is available on Github (https://github.com/USU-CIROH/INFLECT) and a manuscript describing INFLECT is forthcoming (Patterson et al., 2025, Bankfull and Beyond: Identifying persistent reach-scale river corridor features from topography, Water Resources Research, in prep.). This data resource provides information used as inputs for INFLECT, allowing other researchers to try INFLECT or to experiment with other methods to extract information from the data provided.

The data here represent three reaches on two rivers, the Eel River in northern California and the Mad River in Vermont, for six river reaches total. The three reaches in each river are labeled as the "upper", "middle", and "lower". Each reach has a set of digital transects, ranging from 76-288 for each reach, at which geometric data were measured using publicly available topography at 1m DEM resolution.

For each of the six reaches, the following two files are included:
1. Stations - This folder contains a numbered file for each transect. Each row of the file contains a coordinate point and the associated elevation, in meters. The elevation is pulled from a topobathymetric DEM within INFLECT. Stations are set a 1m spacing along the transect. Plotting the provided elevations would visualize the cross-section shape.
2. Widths - This folder contains a numbered file for reach transect. Each file includes width measurements for the cross-section described by the cross-section geometry from the associated Stations file. An "elevation" column in the file associates the width with the corresponding elevation, measured from sea level at 0.10m increments. Because the elevations are measured from the zero-level (i.e., at sea level), there is usually a long list of zero-value width rows until the elevation reaches the bottom of the cross-section.

Files are available in zipped folders due to 50 file size limit for folders.