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Toward generalizable sediment fingerprinting with tracers that are conservative and nonconservative over sediment routing timescales

  • SEDIMENTS, SEC 3 • HILLSLOPE AND RIVER BASIN SEDIMENT DYNAMICS • RESEARCH ARTICLE
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Abstract

Purpose

The science of sediment fingerprinting has been evolving rapidly over the past decade and is well poised to improve our understanding, not only of sediment sources, but also the routing of sediment through watersheds. Here, we discuss channel–floodplain processes that may convolute or modify the sediment fingerprinting signature of alluvial bank/floodplain sources and explore the use of nonconservative tracers for differentiating sediment derived from surface soil erosion from that of near-channel fluvial erosion.

Materials and methods

We use a mathematical model to demonstrate the theoretical effects of channel–floodplain exchange on conservative and nonconservative tracers. Then, we present flow, sediment gauging data, and geochemical measurements of long- (meteoric beryllium-10, 10Be) and short-lived (excess lead-210 and cesium-137, 210Pbex and 137Cs, respectively) radionuclide tracers from two study locations: one above, and the other below, a rapidly incising knick zone within the Maple River watershed, southern Minnesota.

Results and discussion

We demonstrate that measurements of 10Be, 210Pbex, and 137Cs associated with suspended sediment can be used to distinguish between the three primary sediment sources (agricultural uplands, bluffs, and banks) and estimate channel–floodplain exchange. We observe how the sediment sources systematically vary by location and change over the course of a single storm hydrograph. While sediment dynamics for any given event are not necessarily indicative of longer-term trends, the results are consistent with our geomorphic understanding of the system and longer-term observations of sediment dynamics. We advocate for future sediment fingerprinting studies to develop a geomorphic rationale to explain the distribution of the fingerprinting properties for any given study area, with the intent of developing a more generalizable, process-based fingerprinting approach.

Conclusions

We show that measurements of conservative and nonconservative tracers (e.g., long- and short-lived radionuclides) can provide spatially integrated, yet temporally discrete, insights to constrain sediment sources and channel–floodplain exchange at the river network-scale. Fingerprinting that utilizes nonconservative tracers requires that the nonconservative behavior is predictable and verifiable.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and Minnesota Pollution Control Agency with additional support from the National Science Foundation (NSF ENG 1209448) and the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station, Utah State University. JKW was funded by an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship during part of this work. The paper greatly benefitted from suggestions made by two anonymous reviewers as well as Editor-in-Chief, Phil Owens.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Watershed Sciences, Utah State University, 5210 Old Main Hill, Logan, UT, 84322, USA

    Patrick Belmont, Karthik Kumarasamy & Jay M. Hemmis

  2. National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics, University of Minnesota, 2 Third Avenue SE, Minneapolis, MN, 55414, USA

    Patrick Belmont

  3. Department of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Jane K. Willenbring

  4. Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Earth Surface Geochemistry, 14473, Potsdam, Germany

    Jane K. Willenbring & Julia Marquard

  5. St. Croix Watershed Research Station, Science Museum of Minnesota, Marine on St. Croix, MN, 55047, USA

    Shawn P. Schottler

  6. Department of Geography, University of Exeter, Exeter, EX4 4RJ, UK

    Julia Marquard

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  1. Patrick Belmont
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  2. Jane K. Willenbring
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  3. Shawn P. Schottler
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  5. Karthik Kumarasamy
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Correspondence to Patrick Belmont.

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Responsible editor: Rajith Mukundan

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Belmont, P., Willenbring, J.K., Schottler, S.P. et al. Toward generalizable sediment fingerprinting with tracers that are conservative and nonconservative over sediment routing timescales. J Soils Sediments 14, 1479–1492 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-014-0913-5

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