Determination of sediment sources in a mixed watershed within the Appalachian-St. Lawrence Lowland Regions of southern Q
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Determination of sediment sources in a mixed watershed within the Appalachian-St. Lawrence Lowland Regions of southern Quebec using sediment fingerprinting Christina Lachance & David A. Lobb & Geneviève Pelletier & Georges Thériault & François Chrétien
Received: 27 October 2019 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract This paper identifies the main sediment sources to the Beaudet Reservoir in Quebec (Canada) using sediment fingerprinting. The reservoir, which is built on the Bulstrode River and provides drinking water to Victoriaville, has decreased in capacity by 35% in the past 35 years. This study provides new data on fingerprinting in large and complex watersheds, a first in the province of Quebec. Nine sampling sites on the Bulstrode River and its three main tributaries were selected and five sampling campaigns were conducted. Samples from river bank profiles and adjacent fields, along with suspended sediments, were collected. All samples were sieved to 2 mm and analyzed for 137Caesium, 15 geochemical elements and sieved to 63 μm for color analysis. Source classification, based on an ANOVA test to verify the independence hypothesis and iterative linear discriminant analysis to optimize the ratio of inter-group/within-group variability, resulted in four sample classes: agricultural soils, forested soils, stream bank bottom and stream bank top. A KruskalC. Lachance (*) : G. Pelletier Département de génie civil et des eaux, Université Laval, 1065, av. de la Médecine, Québec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada e-mail: [email protected] D. A. Lobb Department of Soil Science and Watershed Systems Research Program, University of Manitoba, 13 Freedman Crescent, Winnipeg, MN R3T 2N2, Canada G. Thériault : F. Chrétien Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 2560, blvd Hochelaga, Québec, QC, G1V 2J3, Canada
Wallis H test then identified 21 out of the 32 tracers with p value < 0.05. The linear discriminant analysis led to a set of 14 tracers, namely 137Cs and 13 color coefficients with a discriminating result of 94%. That combination of 137Cs and color coefficients proved to be a costeffective fingerprint. Based on MixSIAR modeling results, this sediment fingerprinting study has demonstrated that the main sediment sources varied within the watershed but, generally, forested soil particles dominated (33 to 49%), then agricultural soils (43 to 50%) reflecting the land use changes, followed by stream bank bottoms (82%) at the Beaudet Reservoir. Keywords Sediment color . Reservoir . Sediment fingerprinting . Water quality
Introduction Sedimentation is a natural process occurring in water reservoirs (Morris and Fan 1998) and has long been an engineering problem for reservoir managers. It is now known that sediments are carriers for nutrients and, thus, a potential source of contamination in ecosystems. Phosphorus, metals and organic contaminants (Larsen et al. 2010), all associated with sediments, have significant impacts on water quality. Large suspended sediment loads may also increase the cost o
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