Abstract

Rivers are considered to be the most important sources of fresh water and principled mining of materials is momentous. To provide appropriate solutions for reducing the negative impacts of sand and gravel mining is the great challenge in the field of river materials mining. Many of the world's rivers have suffered a lot of problems due to superfluous mining of sand and gravel. The matrix method is one of the most common international methods for evaluating the site of sand and gravel mining from rivers. In the matrix method, based on river characteristics and the materials mining area, it is recognized whether the river has the potential for mining of materials or not, and also which method should be utilized to mine sand and gravel from the river in order to reduce the negative environmental impacts. In this research, a matrix method is applied to a reach of the Dez river in Iran. Dez river is located in the range between the Dez diversion dam to the Hamid-Abad Bridge with braided pattern and a matrix particular to braided river is used to evaluate the mine area of the materials. In the results section, the characteristics table of the mining area of river materials in the studied reach is presented from the Dez river. In addition, the research results show that the volume of sand and gravel mining is about 50 thousand cubic metres and scraped extraction is a suitable method for extracting materials in the studied area.