Linking sediment fingerprinting and modeling outputs for a Spanish Pyrenean

river catchment.

Introduction

Results

Leticia Palazón a*, Borja Latorre a, Leticia Gaspar b, Williams H. Blake c, Hugh G. Smith d and Ana Navas a

a Estación Experimental de Aula Dei, EEAD-CSIC, Department of Soil and Water, Zaragoza, Spainb Environmental Science Program, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, Canadac School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Plymouth University, Plymouth, Devon, United Kingdomd School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

Indirect techniques to study fine sediment redistribution in river catchmentscould provide unique and diverse information, which, when combined becomea powerful tool to address catchment management problems. Suchcombinations could solve limitations of individual techniques and providedifferent lines of information to address a particular problem.

Barasona reservoir catchment Central Spanish Pyrenees.

Purpose: link fingerprinting sediment sources and SWAT model to improve the knowledge of land use sediment source contributions to a reservoir.

The model provided valuable information as the timescale of sediment production from the different land uses within the catchment.The fingerprinting procedure provided information about relative contributions from land use sources to the superficial sediment samples taken fromthe reservoir infill.Linking results from both techniques enabled us to achieve a more holistic view of the erosion processes taking place in the Barasona rivercatchment.

HS9.2/GM7.11/SSS9.24: Quantifying fine sediment redistribution in river catchments: linking monitoring, modelling and tracing

•1509 km2

Model setup: climate, topography, soil and land uses/land covers properties.

Study area

Acknowledgements: This research was financially supported by the project EROMED (CGL2011-25486).

Badland production

78 % of the catchment519 t/km2year

Conclusions

Climate: mountain type, wet and cold.Precipitation and temperature gradients• from 500 mm and 12ºC at the reservoir• to > 2000 mm and < 4ºC above 2000 m a.s.l.

Rugged topography•Altitudinal range of 3000 m •Mean elevation of 1313 m •Average catchment slope: 39 %

0 ⁰C isotherm around 1650 m a.s.l.

•moderate - low structural stability•limited average water contain•textures: loam - sandy loam

Soil characteristics:•stony and alkaline •shallow (< 1 m) •well drained soils

•Arnold, J.G., Srinivasan, R., Muttiah, R.S. and Williams, J.R., 1998. Large Area Hydrologic Modelling and Assessment Part I: Model Development. Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 34(1), 73-89.•Avendaño-Salas, C., Sanz-Montero, E., Cobo-Rayán, R. and Gómez-Montaña, J.L., 1997. Sediment yield at Spanish reservoirs and its relationship with the drainage basin area. In: Proceedings of the 19th Symposium of Large Dams. ICOLD (International Committee on Large Dams), Florence, Italy, pp 863–874.•Navas, A., Valero-Garcés, B.L, Gaspar, L. and Machín, J. 2009. Reconstructing the history of sediment accumulation in the Yesa reservoir: an approach for management of mountain reservoirs. Lake and Reservoir Management, 25(1), 5-27.•Palazón, L., and Navas, A., 2014. Modeling sediment sources and yields in a Pyrenean catchment draining to a large reservoir (Ésera River, Ebro Basin). Journal of Soils and Sediments, 14(9): 1612-1625.•SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool): SWAT model software. U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service, Grassland, Soil & Water Research Laboratory, Temple, Texas.http://swatmodel.tamu.edu/software/swat-model/•Valero-Garcés, B.L., Navas, A., Machín, J. and Walling, D., 1999. Sediment sources and siltation in mountain reservoirs: a case study from the Central Spanish Pyrenees. Geomorphology 28, 23-41.

(Arnold et al. 1998)

Siltation problems(Valero-Garcés et al. 1999; Navas et al. 2009)

• < 1 % of the catchment• Eocene marls

spatially semi-distributed, agro-hydrological model that operates on a daily time step (as a minimum) at basin scale. designed to predict the impact of management on water, sediment and agricultural chemical yields in ungaged catchments. provides physically based algorithms as an option to define many of the important components of the hydrologic cycle.

3) Use of mixing model to estimate the proportional contributions from each source

2) Statistical analysis of differences:

Simulation period: 2003-2005

Fingerprinting procedure:

*Email: lpalazon@eead.csic.es

• agricultural uses • forests • dense scrubland • badlands and subsoils• scrubland

Main sediment sources of the basin:• agricultural uses

• badlands and subsoils

analyzed in the < 63 µm fraction

Fingerprint properties n

environmental radionuclides 6

total organic carbon 1

textural classes 3

elemental composition 25

magnetic susceptibility 2

Range test: range in sediment

≠ : out of range in sources

3 fingerprints excluded

Kruskal Wallis H-test:

1) Conservativeness test:

StepwiseDiscriminant Function Analysis

(minimization of Wilk´s lambda, SPSS)

17 fingerprints

passed

Optimum composite fingerprint: a subset of tracer properties that discriminate the sediment sources

137Cs Sr 40K Ti

4 fingerprints passed

11

=∑=

m

jjx

10 ≤≤ jxjxjia ,

ib

fingerprint i in source type j (j=1 to m)

contribution of source j

fingerprint i (i=1 to n) in the sediment

i

m

jjji bxa =⋅∑

=1,

System solved by: Monte Carlo global

sampling routine

Written in C programming language

Designed to: multiple unmixing samples evaluation

Source characterization by corrected mean

(t-Student distributions)

reproducibility analysis user-defined “seed”

Solutions characterized by the goodness of fit:

∑∑

=

=

∆

−×−=

n

i i

m

j jiji axb

pGOF

1

2

1 ,11

generate and test uniformly distributed solutions

Barasona infill sediment samples:

Solutions: GOF > 92 %

0

25000

50000

75000

100000

125000

150000

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

Jan-03 Jul-03 Jan-04 Jul-04 Jan-05 Jul-05

SY (t

)

stre

amflo

w (m

3s-

1 ) Graus gauge station SY (t)ObservedSimulated

0

25000

50000

75000

100000

125000

150000

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Jan-03 Jul-03 Jan-04 Jul-04 Jan-05 Jul-05

SY (t

)

stre

amflo

w (m

3s-1

) Capella gauge station SY (t)

Observed

Simulated

Calibrated and validated SWAT

project(Palazón and Navas 2014)

Material and Methods

Complementary information

References:

350 t/km2 year of sediment yieldAvendaño-Salas et al. (1997)

•Bathymetric survey in the Barasona reservoir (period 1932-1996)

96 composite samples to characterize: the soil properties in SWAT signatures of potential sediment source materials