“…The former are used to determine "dissolved" constituents whereas the latter are used to determine suspended sediment concentrations (SSCs)/grain-size distributions, and sedimentassociated chemical constituents by subtraction. Although bed sediments have been used in large-scale (e.g., national) environmental surveys, as well as for geochemical reconnaissance (e.g., mineral exploration), they rarely are used in traditional water quality-monitoring programs (e.g., Hawkes and Webb, 1962;Webb et al, 1978;Fauth et al, 1985;Otteson et al, 2000;Gustavsson et al, 2001). However, of all the potential sample media, bed sediments probably are the easiest to collect and process, and are least likely to suffer from contamination or insufficient sample mass/analytical detection issues.…”