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The fractal nature of river networks
Abstract
Ever since Mandelbrot (1975, 1983) coined the term, there has been speculation that river networks are fractals. Here we report analyses done on river networks to determine their fractal structure. We find that the network as a whole, although composed of nearly linear members, is practically space filling with fractal dimension near 2. The empirical results are backed by a theoretical analysis based on long‐standing hydrologic concepts describing the geometric similarity of river networks. These results advance our understanding of the geometry and composition of river networks.
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Citations
Cited by
Tarboton, D. G. (1997) · Water Resources Research · doi:10.1029/96wr03137 · Cited by 2,476
Self-citationAlexander, R. B., Smith, R. A., Schwarz, G. E., Boyer, E. W., Nolan, J. V., & Brakebill, J. W. (2008) · Environmental Science & Technology · doi:10.1021/es0716103 · Cited by 889
Physically based modeling in catchment hydrology at 50: Survey and outlook
Paniconi, C., & Putti, M. (2015) · Water Resources Research · doi:10.1002/2015wr017780 · Cited by 374
Scaling, Universality, and Geomorphology
Dodds, P. S., & Rothman, D. H. (2000) · Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences · doi:10.1146/annurev.earth.28.1.571 · Cited by 304
Minimum energy and fractal structures of drainage networks
Rinaldo, A., Rodriguez‐Iturbe, I., Rigon, R., Bras, R. L., Ijjasz‐Vasquez, E., & Marani, A. (1992) · Water Resources Research · doi:10.1029/92wr00801 · Cited by 290
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Metadata
- Authors
- Tarboton, D. G., Bras, R. L., & Rodriguez‐Iturbe, I.
- Venue
- Water Resources Research
- Publisher
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)
- Published
- 1988-08
- Volume
- 24
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 1317-1322
- ISSN
- 0043-1397 (ISSN-L)
- 1944-7973
- OpenAlex
- W2022967585
- Cited by
- 501
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 11.81
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
