It takes a team to make river work possible!
One of the major challenges with studying rivers is accessing the middle of the channel where most of the water and sediment is transported. Boats and teams of talented colleagues make this field work successful.

Sampling river water and collecting ADCP measurements on the Rio Bermejo, Argentina. Small motor boats, like this aluminum skiff, are powerful yet portable vehicles that help use measure river water discharge and collect samples of river water and suspended sediment.

Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP), used to measure water velocity and total river discharge when surveying a channel cross-section.

A nice article on how this technology works was written by researchers at WHOI

Point-integrated suspended sediment sampler. This instrument can be lowered through the water column and has an electrically-operated valve that opens and closes to collect a suspended sediment sample at a desired depth or integrated over the water column.

These instruments are developed for the Federal Interagency Sedimentation Project (FISP)