  This study is motivated by problems related to environmental transport on
river networks. We establish statistical properties of a flow along a directed
branching network and suggest its compact parameterization. The downstream
network transport is treated as a particular case of nearest-neighbor
hierarchical aggregation with respect to the metric induced by the branching
structure of the river network. We describe the static geometric structure of a
drainage network by a tree, referred to as the static tree, and introduce an
associated dynamic tree that describes the transport along the static tree. It
is well known that the static branching structure of river networks can be
described by self-similar trees (SSTs); we demonstrate that the corresponding
dynamic trees are also self-similar. We report an unexpected phase transition
in the dynamics of three river networks, one from California and two from
Italy, demonstrate the universal features of this transition, and seek to
interpret it in hydrological terms.
