Erosion and Sediment Source Tracing in River Catchment Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Soil erosion is a worldwide problem causing the loss of soil fertility and a reduction in crop productivity. In a global change context, if the intensity of this process exceeds ecosystem resilience it may lead to irreversible degradation. The assessment of erosion is traditionally conducted by analyzing runoff and sediment generation and redistribution in catchment systems, which is highly variable in space and time due to the complex non-linear processes involved. Tracers can reveal the integration of smaller-scale erosion and transport processes into different temporal sources of contribution within larger catchments. Sourcing sediment is then critical toward understanding transfer and essential for targeted management. Recent advances in techniques for discriminating sediment sources provide valuable tools in this regard and help distinguish between human-induced and natural dynamic changes in storage. Under this framework, there is a general apparent lack of validation data in assessing the accuracy of water erosion estimations by modelling, which emphasizes the importance of a close collaboration between field-based erosion scientists, the remote sensing community, and modelers. Therefore, models are needed to explore how intrinsically small-scale ecogeomorphological and human processes can influence the form of entire landscapes, and thus to determine whether these processes create a distinctive topography. This Special Issue is focused on providing a more detailed description of relevant processes of water and sediment transfer between systems as a fundamental step towards understanding the relative importance of linkage problems in erosion processes. Especially, contributions joining hydrological and sediment modeling through field-based, remote-sensing, and tracing studies are very welcome.

Dr. Joan Estrany
Prof. Hanane Reddad
Guest Editors

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• Hydrosedimentary processes in river catchments
• Sediment transport modeling in catchment systems
• Coupling relationships in catchments
• Sediment tracing and sourcing
• Land use / land cover effects on erosion dynamics