Temporal changes in nitrogen concentrations and stream discharge, as well as sediment and nitrogen losses from erosion plots with different land uses, were studied in an agricultural watershed in the Taihu Lake area in eastern China. The highest overland runoff loads and nitrogen losses were measured under the upland at a convergent footslope. Much higher runoff, sediment and nitrogen losses we...

To preserve the quality of surface water, official French regulations require farmers to keep a minimum acreage of grassland, especially bordering rivers. These agro-environmental measures do not account for the circulation of water within the catchment. This paper examines whether it is possible to design with the farmers agri-environmental measures at field and catchment scale to prevent soil...

Although many sediment budgets estimate the effects of logging, few have considered the potential impact of timber harvesting on stream density. Failure to consider changes in stream density could lead to large errors in the sediment budget, particularly between the allocation of natural and anthropogenic sources of sediment. This study conducted field surveys in randomly selected catchments in...

Long-term water quality records for assessing natural variability, impact of management, and that guide regulatory processes to safeguard water resources are rare for California oak woodland rangelands. This study presents a 20-yr record (1981-2000) of nitrate-nitrogen (NO(3)-N) and suspended sediment export from a typical, grazed oak woodland watershed (103 ha) in the northern Sierra Nevada fo...

Stream-bed sediments from three paired catchments, each draining a lower agricultural intensity system and a higher agricultural intensity system, were analysed for (a) total P (TP), (b) bioavailable-P (Resin-P), (c) equilibrium phosphorus concentration (EPC0), and (d) degree of phosphorus saturation (DPS). The influence of agriculture on sediment P was explored within the context of other key ...

The Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) and its derivatives are widely used for identifying watersheds with a high potential for degrading stream water quality. We compared sediment yields estimated from regional application of the USLE, the automated revised RUSLE2, and five sediment delivery ratio algorithms to measured annual average sediment delivery in 78 catchments of the Chesapeake Bay w...

The stream buffer is the region immediately be yond the banks of a stream that serves to limit the entrance of sediment, pollutants, and nutrients to the stream itself. When forested, a stream buffer promotes bank stability and serves as a major control of water temperature (Leopold, 1997). From a biological perspective, the importance of a healthy, intact riparian zone has only been understood...

Seasonal turbidity patterns and event-level hysteresis analysis of turbidity verses discharge in four 1 km headwater catchments in California’s Sierra Nevada indicate localized in-channel sediment sources and seasonal accumulation-depletion patterns of stream sediments. Turbidity signals were analyzed for three years in order to look at the relationships between seasonal turbidity trends, event...