Insight into the local bed-level dynamics to assist management of multi-funtional rivers

River discharge fluctuations cause bed-level variations at various scales, resulting from spatial gradients in the river’s geometry (Bolla Pittaluga et al., 2014), local interventions (Paarlberg et al., 2020) or backwater effects (Arkesteijn et al, 2019). These bed-level variations can affect river functions such as navigation. Insight into these bed-level variations and their relation to discharge fluctuations can help to predict and prevent the formation of local bottlenecks. In this paper, we
use bi-weekly bed-level measurements of the river Waal to estimate the bed-level variations related to the river discharge, assuming that the river planform remains constant. We apply a wavelet transform to disentangle the relevant spatial scales from the measurements.