Suspended‐sediment sources in an urban watershed, Northeast Branch Anacostia River, Maryland

Abstract

Abstract:Fine sediment sources were characterized by chemical composition in an urban watershed, the Northeast Branch Anacostia River, which drains to the Chesapeake Bay. Concentrations of 63 elements and two radionuclides were measured in possible land-based sediment sources and suspended sediment collected from the water column at the watershed outlet during storm events. These tracer concentrations were used to determine the relative quantity of suspended sediment contributed by each source. Although this is an urbanized watershed, there was not a distinct urban signature that can be evaluated except for the contributions from road surfaces. We identified the sources of fine sediment by both physiographic province (Piedmont and Coastal Plain) and source locale (streambanks, upland and street residue) by using different sets of elemental tracers. The Piedmont contributed the majority of the fine sediment for seven of the eight measured storms. The streambanks contributed the greatest quantity of fine sediment when evaluated by source locale. Street residue contributed 13% of the total suspended sediment on average and was the source most concentrated in anthropogenically enriched elements. Combining results from the source locale and physiographic province analyses, most fine sediment in the Northeast Branch watershed is derived from streambanks that contain sediment eroded from the Piedmont physiographic province of the watershed. Sediment fingerprinting analyses are most useful when longer term evaluations of sediment erosion and storage are also available from streambankerosion measurements, sediment budget and other methods.

Fluorescence‐based source tracking of organic sediment in restored and unrestored urban streams

“…Many of the streams in this watershed have high sediment loads and are listed as impaired under the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program (US Environmental Protection Agency ). Mineral sediment source tracking studies suggest that the majority (58% annual average) of suspended sediment in the North Branch Anacostia River, an urban watershed, derives from stream banks, with the remainder coming from street residue (13%) and uplands (30%) (Devereux et al ). That finding is consistent with the ubiquity of stream incision (often reaching up to several meters) in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.…”

Fingerprinting sediment sources in a large agricultural catchment under no‐tillage in Southern Brazil (Conceição River)

“…In addition to modeling and monitoring studies, the sediment fingerprinting technique was shown to provide a powerful tool to identify sediment sources in Brazil (Miguel, Dalmolin, Pedron, Moura‐Bueno, & Tiecher, ; Minella, Merten, Reichert, & dos Santos, ; Minella, Merten, Walling, & Reichert, ; Minella, Walling, & Merten, , ; Tiecher et al, ; Tiecher, Caner, et al, ; Tiecher, Caner, Minella, & dos Santos, ; Tiecher, Caner, Minella, Bender, & dos Santos, ; Tiecher, Minella, et al, ) and elsewhere in the world, such as in France (Foucher et al, ; Legout et al, ; Navratil, Evrard, Esteves, Legout, et al, ; Poulenard et al, ), Mexico (Evrard et al, ), South Africa (Foster, Boardman, & Keay‐Bright, ), Zambia (Walling, Collins, Sichingabula, & GJL, ), Canada (Barthod et al, ; Koiter et al, ; Stone, Collins, Silins, Emelko, & Zhang, ), United States (Devereux, Prestegaard, Needelman, & Gellis, ), United Kingdom (Collins, Walling, Webb, & King, ; Pulley, Foster, & Antunes, ; Smith & Blake, ), Spain (Brosinsky, Foerster, Segl, & Kaufmann, ), Luxemburg (Martínez‐Carreras et al, ), Turkey (D'Haen et al, ), Tunisia (Ben Slimane et al, ), Iran (Haddadchi, Nosrati, & Ahmadi, ), and Australia (Laceby, McMahon, Evrard, & Olley, ; Olley, Burton, Smolders, Pantus, & Pietsch, ; Wilkinson, Hancock, Bartley, Hawdon, & Keen, ). Therefore, the objective of the current study is to quantify the contribution of sources supplying sediment to the river in a catchment characterized by the widespread implementation of NT since the 1990s in Southern Brazil.…”

Temporal Dynamics of Sediment Sources in an Urbanizing Mediterranean Catchment

“…Many different properties have been considered to discriminate potential sediment sources in catchments, such as sediment colour (Poulenard et al ., ), mineral magnetism (Walden et al ., ), environmental radionuclides (Lim et al ., ), geochemical composition (Carter et al ., ), stable isotopes (Bai et al ., ), rare earth elements (Morton, ) and particle size (Stone & Saunderson, ). The behaviour of each tracer in the erosion and transport process must be conservative (Devereux et al ., ), and usually more than one tracer is used (composite fingerprint) for better discrimination of a wide range of potential sources (Collins & Walling, ; Zhang & Liu, ). After establishing the composite fingerprints, the importance of different potential sources can be assessed by the subsequent application of a multivariate mixing model (Carter et al ., ; Nosrati et al ., ; Franz et al ., ; Liu et al ., ).…”