Richard Measures

National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research | NIWA · Centre for Freshwater and Estuaries

Contemporary management practices have artificially confined (strangled) river systems in Aotearoa New Zealand to support intensified land use in riparian areas. These practices work against nature, diminishing the functionality and biodiversity values of living rivers, and associated socio‐cultural relations with rivers. River confinement can acce...

In this paper we develop a two-dimensional modelling framework suitable to study the morphological evolution of vegetated braided rivers. The mathematical model features a unisize-sediment morphological model, which includes accounting for bank erosion, and a vegetation model. While these model components had already appeared separately in differen...

Inefficient use of irrigation in New Zealand pastoral farms is widespread and the uptake of irrigation scheduling tools to improve efficiency is poor. Recent studies suggest that end-user inclusive participatory approaches to developing tools and practices could improve the uptake, contributing to improved economic and environmental outcomes. Using...

Efficient water use is an important outcome of effective irrigation scheduling strategies. We developed a physically-based hydrology tool IrriSET (Irrigation Strategy Evaluation Tool) to simulate the performance of different scheduling strategies against three water use metrics - amount of irrigation used, drainage resulted from irrigation, and dur...

Pressures on braided river systems in New Zealand are increasing due to anthropogenic stresses such as demand for irrigation water, braidplain conversion to farmland and invasive vegetation, as well as extreme natural events associated with earthquakes and climate change. These pressures create issues around preserving braided river physical enviro...

We investigated the response of a tidal lagoon system to a unique situation of relative sea-level change induced by powerful earthquakes (up to Mw 7.1) on the east coast of New Zealand in 2010–2011. Spatiotemporal impacts were quantified using airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) datasets complemented by hydrodynamic modelling and evaluatio...

The river mouth lagoons of New Zealand's gravel-bed braided rivers are highly dynamic, responding to changes in waves and river flows at timescales of hours and days to years. Unlike other freshwater-dominated coastal wetlands and lagoons, they exist along open coasts that are typically retreating with cliffed hinterlands. These lagoons are common...

Predictions of river bed substrate cover are required for various purposes including delineating management zones, linking with ecological status and assessing river rehabilitation options. Three contrasting methods were tested for predicting the proportion of river bed covered by seven different substrate categories: generalised linear models (GLM...

In this paper we analyze the performance of several non-cohesive bank erosion algorithms to be embedded into two-dimensional models for river hydro-morphodynamics on non-moving meshes. To avoid the complexity of analyzing two-dimensional model results arising from the non-linear interaction between flow, fluvial transport and bank erosion, we devel...

Accurate flood forecasts permit short-term countermeasures and evacuations, reducing economic losses and saving lives. Real time hydrodynamic modelling is widely used in flood forecasting to route forecast flood hydrographs and predict water level and inundation extent. However, hydrodynamic modelling in real time is challenging as forecasting mode...

The focus of this study is on understanding salinity changes in the vicinity of the freshwater-saltwater interface in estuarine ecosystems. In these areas, species, habitats and ecosystems that are adapted to brackish conditions are expected to migrate in response to salinity changes under sea level rise. For the Avon Heathcote Estuary in Christchu...

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Numerical morphological modelling of braided rivers, using a physics-based approach, is increasingly used as a technique to explore controls on river pattern and, from an applied perspective, to simulate the impact of channel modifications. This paper assesses a depth averaged non-uniform sediment model (Delft3D) to predict the morphodynamics of a...

The development of three-dimensional reconstructions of channel morphology has historically been limited by the high costs of geospatial data collection and software modelling. Advances in image processing, sensor technology and portable remote-sensing platforms, however, now offer the opportunity to derive survey quality terrain models at signific...

View the talk at: https://youtu.be/ArlGqQhtJSs or via http://ecan.govt.nz/our-responsibilities/regional-leadership/Pages/NERP.aspx UC scientists Drs Deirdre Hart and Matthew Hughes combined forces with NIWA scientist Richard Measures to discuss the effects of the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence on coastal environments, including the estuary as par...

Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data were acquired over the coastal city of Christchurch, New Zealand, prior to and throughout the 2010 to 2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence. Differencing of pre-and post-earthquake LiDAR data reveals land surface and waterway deformation due to seismic shaking and tectonic displacements above blind fa...

This investigation comprised an interlinked chain of studies: hydrological analysis, LiDAR based topographic mapping, roughness mapping, historic flood mapping, bathymetry, hydrodynamic modelling, floodway modelling, risk analysis and animations. The hydrological analysis of rain intensities showed there is considerable uncertainty in the slope-are...

[1] Gravel-bed braided rivers are characterized by shallow, branching flow across low relief, complex, and mobile bed topography. These conditions present a major challenge for the application of higher dimensional hydraulic models, the predictions of which are nevertheless vital to inform flood risk and ecosystem management. This paper demonstrate...

Questions concerning past, present, and future temporal trends in the sediment load of the Lower Mississippi River are of great importance because the redistribution of available Mississippi River sediment is vital to on-going efforts to reduce land loss and restore coastal marshes and wetlands in Louisiana. This document reports the results of a 1...

This study uses measured bed topography scans and fractional bed load transport rate data obtained from previous laboratory studies of gravel transport to examine the influence of the local grain-scale topography on grain entrainment and fractional transport rates. A simple steady state fluid model is developed to impose fluid forces onto the expos...