Sediment Budget and Sediment Fingerprinting as Management Strategies to Understand Sediment Contributions to Receiving Waters

A sound understanding of the sediment sources contributing to the sediment flux and the overall sediment budget of a watershed is key to total maximum daily load (TMDL) management strategies that focus on reducing sediment and sediment-related nutrient loadings to streams. This understanding can be provided by performing complementary sediment-source fingerprinting and sediment-budgeting investigations. The sediment fingerprinting approach quantifies the relative proportion of the potential sediment sources and the delivery of sediment from these sources. Sediment budget approaches provide information on the magnitude and location of the fluxes and the links between sources, sinks, and sediment output. Sediment budget approaches can include field based, photogrammetric, GIS, and modeling approaches to identify the important sources, erosion, and storage areas of sediment within a watershed. Combining sediment budget and sediment fingerprinting approaches provides resource managers with information on where to target mitigation measures that reduce erosion, and sediment delivery. Many watersheds across the U.S. have or are soon implementing TMDL allocations to reduce sediment and nutrient loadings. Streambank erosion is typically not accounted for in statistical, empirical, and process-based models, yet it is a major source of sediment in many watersheds. We present several examples of sediment budget and sediment fingerprinting studies from the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the Driftless Area, Wisconsin where information on loading of streambank sediment has been used (successfully) to shape upland and stream corridor management practices.