Estimating the main hydrodynamic features of real vegetated water bodies is crucial to assure a balance between their hydraulic conveyance and environmental quality. Riparian vegetation stands have a high impact on vegetated channels. The present work has the aim to integrate riparian vegetation’s reflectance indices and hydrodynamics of real vegetated water flows to assess the impact of riparian vegetation morphometry on bulk drag coefficients distribution along an abandoned vegetated drainage channel fully covered by 9–10 m high Arundo donax (commonly known as giant reed) stands, starting from flow average velocities measurements at 30 cross-sections identified along the channel. A map of riparian vegetation cover was obtained through digital processing of Unnamed Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-acquired multispectral images, which represent a fast way to observe riparian plants’ traits in hardly accessible areas such as vegetated water bodies in natural conditions. In this study, the portion of riparian plants effectively interacting with flow was expressed in terms of ground-based Leaf Area Index measurements (LAI), which easily related to UAV-based Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The comparative analysis between Arundo donax stands NDVI and LAI map enabled the analysis of the impact of UAV-acquired multispectral imagery on bulk drag predictions along the vegetated drainage channel.

This study examines the problem of flow resistance due to rigid vegetation in open channel flow. The reliability of the conventional flow resistance equations (i.e. Keulegan, Manning and Chézy-Bazin) for vegetated flows at high submergence, i.e. h/k >5, (where h = flow depth and k = vegetation height) is assessed. Several modern flow resistance equations based on a two-layer approach are examined, showing that they transform into the conventional equations at high submergences. To compare the conventional flow resistance equations at high submergences, an experimental methodology is proposed and applied to the experimental data reported in the literature and collected for this study. The results demonstrate the reliability of the Keulegan equation in predicting the flow resistance. Based on the obtained results, a model to evaluate the Nikuradse equivalent sand-grain roughness, kN, starting from the vegetation height and density, is proposed and tested.

Metallic thin-walled beams with continuously varying cross-sections loaded in compression are particularly sensitive to instability problems due to lateral-torsional buckling. Such a phenomenon depends on several parameters, including the cross-sectional properties along the entire length, material properties, load distribution, support, and restraint conditions. Due to the difficulty of obtaining analytic solutions for the problem under consideration, the present study takes a numerical approach based on a variational formulation of the lateral-torsional buckling problem of tapered C-beams. Numerical simulations are compared with experimental results on the buckling of a physical model of at thin-walled beam with uniformly varying cross-section, with the aim of assessing the accuracy of the proposed approach. The good agreement between numerical and experimental results and the reduced computational effort highlight that the proposed variational approach is a powerful tool, provided that the geometry of the structure and the boundary conditions are accurately modeled.