HR: 16:00h
AN: H24B-01 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Establishing Catchment Sediment Budgets
AU: * Walling, D E
EM: d.e.walling@exeter.ac.uk
AF: University of Exeter, Department of Geography, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, , Exeter, EX4 4RJ United Kingdom
AU: Collins, A L
EM: a.l.collins@exeter.ac.uk
AF: University of Exeter, Department of Geography, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, , Exeter, EX4 4RJ United Kingdom
AB: The sediment budget concept, first introduced more than 40 years ago, is of fundamental importance to an understanding of the interaction between sediment mobilization, delivery, storage and yield within a catchment, and such understanding is a key requirement for designing effective sediment control and management strategies. However, despite its importance as a concept, from both a scientific and management perspective, there have to date been few successful attempts to establish detailed sediment budgets for individual catchments. Arguably, therefore, the sediment budget concept has yet to be fully exploited as a practical or operational tool within a management context. Recent advances in monitoring sediment loads, establishing sediment sources, documenting sediment mobilisation and storage on the slopes of a catchment and quantifying storage on river floodplains, in river channels and in other sediment sinks have, however, greatly advanced the potential for establishing reliable sediment budgets for small and intermediate sized catchments. In particular, the use of environmental or fallout radionuclides to trace sediment mobilization and transfer within a drainage basin has provided important new opportunities for obtaining spatially distributed and temporally integrated data on sediment mobilization, delivery and storage. Several examples of the application of these and related techniques to the establishment of sediment budgets for small and intermediate sized agricultural catchments in both the UK and overseas (e.g. Africa) will be presented. Despite such advances, significant problems still remain. These include the need to reconcile the different levels of temporal resolution associated with different techniques, and the inability to effect a rigorous budget closure in most investigations. The need for further work in developing techniques for establishing sediment budgets and in facilitating the application of the sediment budget concept as an operational tool will be reviewed.
DE: 1625 Geomorphology and weathering (0790, 1824, 1825, 1826, 1886)
DE: 1804 Catchment
DE: 1815 Erosion
DE: 4558 Sediment transport (1862)
DE: 4863 Sedimentation (1861)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005