Sediment source apportionment under different spatial frameworks in an agricultural watershed in atlantic Canada
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Date
2016
Authors
Boudreault, Monica
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Abstract
Sediments negatively impact the quality of surface waters and are a significant source of contaminants, such as nutrients and pesticides in agricultural watersheds. Sediment fingerprinting is a relatively recent technique capable of determining the origin of suspended sediment. In this thesis, we investigated the sources of suspended sediments in a predominantly rural watershed in Atlantic Canada. Our first objective was to determine sediment source apportionment estimates by treating the watershed as a single catchment, and making the assumption that conditions affecting source production and transport, from the land to the stream, were uniform across the watershed. For the first objective, suspended sediments were collected at a single target location for sediment apportionment (main outlet) and used to represent sediment dynamics throughout the entire catchment. For the second objective, we examined not only the whole watershed but also sub-watersheds within it, to better understand processes affecting sediment dynamics.
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Keywords
Sediment fingerprinting, Sediment source tracing, Tracers, Water quality, Sediment properties