Floodplain architecture of an actively meandering river (the Ploučnice River, the Czech Republic) as revealed by the distribution of pollution and electrical resistivity tomography

• A simple way to visualise floodplain architecture
• The use and limits of electric resistivity tomography in floodplains with fine clastics
• Pollution chemostratigraphy in a floodplain that is affected by U mining
• An estimate of the rate of reworking of overbank fines

The aim of this study was to describe the floodplain architecture of the Ploučnice River, a naturally meandering river in the Czech Republic, using manual drill coring, the element analysis of sediments, and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT). The Ploučnice River has received diffuse pollution since the early twentieth century (mainly Pb) followed by a prominent, temporally well-defined pollution pulse from uranium mining in the 1970s and 1980s (mainly U and 226Ra). The pollution created a chemostratigraphic (temporal) framework for overbank fines. We used geographical information systems (GIS) to describe the channel's dynamics and visualise fluvial landforms. We sampled and analysed the finest floodplain sediments in the top 1 to 2 m of the floodplain fill (silty and sandy deposits), and we used ERT to visualise bodies of coarser and deeper strata at depths down to ~ 3 m. Several limits of ERT imaging have been found by a comparison of the resistivity domains with lithological descriptions of the cores: several decimetre-thick strata were not revealed (they are below the spatial resolution of that method), and humidity affected the results that were obtained in the topmost strata. The space for deposition of fluvial sediments in the Ploučnice River is being created by (1) natural lateral shifts in the channel (up to 0.5 m/year); (2) meander loop development and cutoffs at the timescale of decades to centuries and spatial scale of up to ~ 1/4 of the floodplain width; and (3) more substantial reorganisation of the channel structure by avulsions, probably at the timescale of centuries. These processes continuously create space for the deposition of overbank fines on the top of former point bars and in swales and abandoned channels. As a consequence of the speed of the channel shifts, at least 80% of the fine-grained top of the floodplain fill (overbank fines) was reworked over approximately three centuries.