Paired Watershed Study of Suspended Sediment Sources in a Watershed Undergoing Road-Building and Timber Harvest, Railroad Gulch, Coastal Northern California, USA

This presentation reports on the first three years of a paired watershed study to evaluate sediment sources and sediment delivery from roads and timber harvest units in in two small, highly erodible watersheds on the South Fork of the Elk River in coastal Northern California. The study design includes two years of pre-treatment, one year of data collection after road construction, and four years of monitoring after timber harvest in year four. The control watershed is the 1.48 km2 West Branch of Railroad Gulch. The 1.28 km2 East Branch had 0.84 km of new road construction in summer 2015 and 1.52 km of road reopening. 47% of the watershed was selectively logged in summer 2016 using both ground-based and cable logging. Road condition surveys assess rill erosion and delivery to waterways. Headward migration of low order waterways and landslide activation and delivery is assessed with aerial and field surveys. Further field measurements include streamside landslide and channel bank erosion inventories, cross section surveys, and pebble counts. During storm events turbidity synoptic sampling takes place on the main stem of each branch and at small tributary mouths. Monitoring at the outlets of the basins consists of continuous turbidity and discharge recording throughout the year, and automated pump sampling and synoptic sampling for total suspended sediment concentrations during storm events. Rainfall and peak flow analysis, and determination of long term erosion rates with Be-10 methods, completes the study. The initial results indicate that suspended sediment loads from the two basins are strongly correlated, with respectively 38.26 and 49.22 Mg km-2 from the East and West Branch in the exceptionally dry water year of 2014, and 716.07 and 860.55 Mg km-2 in water year 2015. The much higher loading in 2015 is attributed to the higher rainfall, particularly one large storm that triggered debris torrents and streamside failures. Shallow landslides that are hydrologically connected strongly influenced downstream turbidity. Cross-sectional surveys indicated that channel banks remained stable with limited thalweg scour between 2014 and 2015.