Channel planform change on the river dee meanders, 1876–1992

Abstract Channel planform change was investigated along an 18 km section of the River Dee on the Welsh‐English border by overlaying information from historical maps and air photographs. The information on river planform change spans the last 115 years, during which time the river has been subject to increasing flow regulation, which may have affected its planform. The downstream location of the reach provides two additional factors which may have an impact on the nature and rate of planform change through their influence on energy conditions in the reach: a tidal backwater influence on the downstream section of the reach; and a low angle of slope. The reach has shown very small changes in planform over the last 115 years, which have been successfully identified by a geographical information system (GIS)‐based data handling methodology, which not only allows the estimation of a variety of indices of change, but also supports the estimation of the potential errors associated with registering the historical sources to a common base and digitizing the channel boundary locations. The study is successful in identifying channel planform change because it has utilized a GIS‐based as opposed to a manual approach, but it represents the lower limit to which bank movement can be confidently identified in a low‐power river environment from 1:10000 scale sources. The changes identified by the GIS‐based methodology include a decrease in channel mobility in a downstream direction; a predominantly oscillatory movement pattern in locations where channel movement has occurred; and an apparent propagation of a decrease in channel width downstream through the reach during the period since 1949, which is the main period of increasing flow regulation.