Alluvial sedimentation rates from southeastern Australia indicate post-European settlement landscape recovery

OCTOPUS: An Open Cosmogenic Isotope and Luminescence Database

“…The suite of techniques includes thermoluminescence dating (TL) in which the luminescence signal is produced by heating mineral grains in the laboratory during measurement (Aitken, 1985;Huntley et al, 1985), and 10 optically stimulated luminescence dating (OSL) in which the luminescence signal is produced by exposing the mineral grains to an intense light source (Aitken, 1998). The suite of techniques can be used to date events as young as a few decades (e.g., Wolfe et al, 1995;Rustomji and Pietsch, 2007;Pietsch et al, 2015;Croke et al, 2016) to as old as nearly 1 Ma (Arnold et al, 2015). The basis of both TL and OSL dating resides in measurements of the trapped charge (e.g., electrons) within mineral lattice imperfections which accumulate over time.…”

Controls on Suspended Sediment Concentrations and Turbidity within a Reforested, Southern Appalachian Headwater Basin

“…), the underlying bedrock geology, and land cover, particularly the type, size and density of vegetation. It is no surprise then that human induced changes in land use may alter both water and sediment inputs to the drainage network [11][12][13], which in turn, have the potential to alter both the quantity and quality of river waters. Moreover, it is commonly assumed that rivers trend toward a state of dynamic equilibrium in which, over a period of years, they adjust their width, depth, slope, roughness, planimetric configuration, and pattern to effectively transport the available sediment through a stream reach under the prevailing hydrologic regime [14,15].…”

“…Perhaps one of the most extensively studied examples of the linkages between land-use change, channel response(s), and sediment loadings are the effects associated with European Settlement in the U.S. (and elsewhere) [13,16,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. Although the details of the alterations vary, many watersheds in the eastern U.S. were found to exhibit a common disturbance history and associated suite of responses including: (1) extensive deforestation of hillslope and valley bottoms, followed by increased runoff and runoff rates to the drainage network; (2) hillslope gullying and accelerated soil erosion resulting in increased sediment loadings to the channel; (3) enhanced rates of deposition on floodplains, and/or upon the channel bed, producing what are commonly referred to as legacy sediments; and (4) a period of reforestation that was combined with the application of improved watershed management practices that resulted in reduced runoff, sediment production and loadings, and, in many instances, channel incision [16,20,21].…”

“…Although the details of the alterations vary, many watersheds in the eastern U.S. were found to exhibit a common disturbance history and associated suite of responses including: (1) extensive deforestation of hillslope and valley bottoms, followed by increased runoff and runoff rates to the drainage network; (2) hillslope gullying and accelerated soil erosion resulting in increased sediment loadings to the channel; (3) enhanced rates of deposition on floodplains, and/or upon the channel bed, producing what are commonly referred to as legacy sediments; and (4) a period of reforestation that was combined with the application of improved watershed management practices that resulted in reduced runoff, sediment production and loadings, and, in many instances, channel incision [16,20,21]. This frequently recognized sequence has led some investigators to argue that the current conditions of the river system in terms of both sediment yields and channel morphology will depend on where the watershed rests along this disturbance-recovery sequence [13,27].…”

“…For example, it is now widely accepted that the deposition and subsequent reworking of legacy sediments by means of bank erosion has increased the current influx of sediment, nutrients, trace metals, etc. to river systems above that estimated for the same watersheds prior to European settlement [13,16,21,[30][31][32][33][34][35][36].…”