• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.49-60
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• 2021

This study presents a methodology to estimate two distinct fractal dimensions of natural river basin by using fractal tree concept. To this end, an analysis is performed on fractal features of a complete drainage network which consists of all possible drainage paths within a river basin based on the growth process of fractal tree. The growth process of fractal tree would occur only within the limited drainage paths possessing stream flow features in a river basin. In the case of small river basin, the bifurcation process of network is more sensitive to the growth step of fractal tree than the meandering process of stream segment, so that various bifurcation structures could be generated in a single network. Therefore, fractal dimension of network structure for small river basin should be estimated in the form of a range not a single figure. Furthermore, the network structures with fractal tree from this study might be more useful information than stream networks from a topographic or digital map for analysis of drainage structure on small river basin.