An innovative approach was recently proposed to increase water depth and improve navigation in rivers by increasing overall roughness through an adaptive placement of artificial vegetation. In this approach, a section of the river width is covered with artificial vegetation constructed from an array of dampers that can be added or removed while maintaining sufficient width for navigational purposes. The goal of the work here is to explore the mean flow and turbulent momentum transport properties of such flow in a controlled flume setting, where the flow rate is steady, the vegetation placement is uniform, and the Froude number is maintained at sub-critical conditions. The focus is on vegetation-induced roughness alterations to the bulk flow statistics as well as the structure of turbulence impacted by the presence of such artificially engineered vegetation. The canopy flow experimentally explored here differs from the …