ABSTRACT
Quantifying sediment transport in general, and bed load transport in mountain streams in particular, remains a challenging task, despite the development of a wide range of in-stream measurement techniques and advances in numeric modelling. Uncertainties often result from temporal variations in sediment transport and related spatial variability in river bed sediment storage. ‘Bed load pulses’ occur on various scales and have been associated with variations in upstream sediment supply, the migration of sediment units (ranging from bedload sheets to bar complexes), changes in channel configuration and autogenic processes (Gomez et al. 1989). One approach to investigating these is to infer transport rates from morphological change, which makes bedload transport studies in general increasingly amenable to adoption of rapidly advancing remote sensing techniques. In this paper, we present an integrated, remote sensing based method for quantifying event-based bedload transport rates and sediment delivery rates in an actively braiding sedimentation reach of a mountain stream.
