Abstract: River flow is governed by resistance laws and its energy consumption against flow resistance is affected by various factors including flow and sediment conditions and riverbed morphology. The macro morphology of a river is a consequence of flow resistance, and its channel adapts to different boundary conditions of flow and sediment through adjusting morphology. Based on a dialectical relationship between energy consumption by resistance and river morphology, this paper introduces a river morphological parameter for simple discriminance of river patterns. We conduct statistical analysis on this new parameter using the data of several natural rivers of sandy and gravel beds and make correction for the influence of riparian vegetation factors on river patterns. And then we derive its empirical expression through data fitting and obtain the standard curves of different river patterns. Verification against the classical measurements reported previously and analysis of natural river data show that our method is simple to calculate and effective in classifying river patterns.

Key words: energy consumption by resistance, river pattern, river morphology parameter, riparian vegetation