J. Wesley Lauer

Large Shift in Source of Fine Sediment in the Upper Mississippi River

Although sediment is a natural constituent of rivers, excess loading to rivers and streams is a leading cause of impairment and biodiversity loss. Remedial actions require identification of the sources and mechanisms of sediment supply. This task is complicated by the scale and complexity of large watersheds as well as changes in climate and land use that alter the drivers of sediment supply. Previous studies in Lake Pepin, a natural lake on the Mississippi River, indicate that sediment supply to the lake has increased 10-fold over the past 150 years. Herein we combine geochemical fingerprinting and a suite of geomorphic change detection techniques with a sediment mass balance for a tributary watershed to demonstrate that, although the sediment loading remains very large, the dominant source of sediment has shifted from agricultural soil erosion to accelerated erosion of stream banks and bluffs, driven by increased river discharge. Such hydrologic amplification of natural erosion processes calls for a new approach to watershed sediment modeling that explicitly accounts for channel and floodplain dynamics that amplify or dampen landscape processes. Further, this finding illustrates a new challenge in remediating nonpoint sediment pollution and indicates that management efforts must expand from soil erosion to factors contributing to increased water runoff.

A numerical model to develop long-term sediment budgets using isotopic sediment fingerprints

Developing accurate long-term, basin-scale sediment budgets using isotopic sediment fingerprints requires a sediment routing model that not only accounts for a range of sediment source terms (e.g. tributaries, surface erosion and erosion of bluffs and terraces) but also considers the variation in time of volume and tracer concentration for the sediment stored in the floodplain. This is accomplished here using a tracer routing model that accounts for production and decay of radioisotopes in the floodplain. The numerical model focuses on the average (i.e. across many hydrographs or years) budget of sediment and tracers at reach scale. To account for storage and remobilization of bulk sediment and/or tracer material, the model represents the floodplain as a system that can gain or lose mass depending on overbank deposition and net bank erosion rates. Isotopic tracers within the floodplain reservoir can be produced as a function of cosmic ray bombardment or atmospheric fallout, and can decay according to a first-order rate equation. Governing equations are derived using a simplified geometry that treats rivers at reach scale: channel sinuosity and migration rates are user-specified parameters, exchange of sediment and tracers between the river and floodplain is modeled at each cross section, and governing equations are derived in a 1D, width-averaged formulation. When the system reaches mobile equilibrium, the sediment deposited on the floodplain through overbank deposition is balanced by the sediment eroded from the floodplain through channel migration and by sediment contributed from external sources. The model is applied to a generic river system and is shown to converge over time to an equilibrium condition that is consistent with an independent analytical solution.