What's Next

MoRPHED was originally developed as part of Alan Kasprak's PhD dissertation, with lots of help from Konrad Hafen and many others. The work was supervised by Joe Wheaton with funding from the National Science Foundation.

...but the current version of MoRPHED is by no means the end of the road! One of the reasons we release the source code for MoRPHED is so that you can feel free to make your own additions or improvements to the model, and ultimately help us address some of our "wish-list" items for the model going forward. These include:

  • Simulation of vegetation growth through time
  • The ability to transport and track fine sediment dynamics
  • Coupling of an ecohydraulic model to predict co-evolution of morphodynamics and habitat availability
  • Automated delineation of geomorphic/hydraulic units as the channel evolves
  • Updated and improved bank erosion and lateral migration algorithms as they become available
  • ...and any items you think might help!
If we've done our job right, MoRPHED is not only a working model for gravel bed river morphodynamics, but (perhaps more importantly), an evolving open-source framework for exploring how different process representations allow us to improve our models' outputs. So please use the model, download and build the source code, and feel free to add on and improve our work as you see fit. And as you do, let us know about what works and what doesn't!