USING 137CS MEASUREMENTS TO ESTABLISH CATCHMENT SEDIMENT BUDGETS AND EXPLORE SCALE EFFECTS.

Growing awareness of the wider environmental significance of fine sediment transport by rivers and associated sedimentproblems linked to sediment-water quality interactions, nutrient and contaminant transfer, and the degradation of aquatichabitats has resulted in the need for an improved understanding of the mobilization and transfer of sediment in catchmentsto support the development of effective sediment management strategies. The sediment budget provides a key integratingconcept for assembling information on the internal functioning of a catchment in terms of its sediment dynamics by providinginformation on the mobilization, transfer, storage and output of sediment. One key feature of a catchment sediment budgetis the relationship between the sediment yield at the catchment outlet and rates of sediment mobilization and transfer withinthe catchment, which is commonly represented by the sediment delivery ratio. To date, most attempts to derive estimates ofthis ratio have been based on a comparison of the measured sediment yield from a catchment with an estimate of the erosionoccurring within the catchment, derived from an erosion prediction procedure, such as the Universal Soil Loss Equation(USLE) or its revised version, RUSLE. There is a need to obtain more direct and spatially distributed evidence of the erosionrates occurring within a catchment and to characterize the links between sediment mobilization, transfer, storage and outputmore explicitly. In this context, fallout radionuclides have proved particularly useful as sediment tracers. This paper reportsthe results of a study aimed at exploring the use of caesium-137 (137Cs) measurements to establish sediment budgets for threecatchments of different sizes and contrasting land use located in Calabria, southern Italy. Long-term measurements of sedimentoutput were available for the catchments, and, by using the estimates of gross and net rates of soil loss within the catchmentsprovided by 137Cs measurements, it was possible to establish the key components of the sediment budget for each catchment.By documenting the sediment budgets of three catchments of different sizes, the study provides a basis for exploring theeffects of scale on catchment sediment budgets and, in particular, the increasing importance of catchment storage as the sizeof the catchment increases. The results of this study demonstrate a reduction in the sediment delivery ratio from 98 to 2% ascatchment area increases from 1Ð47 ha to 31Ð2 km2. Copyright ? 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.