TRACING 2023
Thematic International Study Day
Novel strategies of sediment tracing in catchments and river systems
Sunday 23 April 2023
Meeting place: University of Vienna, Austria
Main organizers:
Dr. Sabine Kraushaar (Univ. of Vienna, Austria) and Dr. Olivier Evrard (LSCE, Univ. Paris-Saclay, France)
With the financial support of the following institution
Previous initiatives (TRACING 2021 Thematic School)
Information on the TRACING 2021 School is available on this page.
A publication describing the main outputs of the discussions held during the TRACING School has been accepted in the Journal of Soils and Sediments in March 2022.
Evrard, O., et al. (2022). Improving the design and implementation of sediment fingerprinting studies: Summary and outcomes of the TRACING 2021 Scientific School. Journal of Soils and Sediments 22, 1648-1661.
You can access it from here.
A first International Tracing Day 2022 was also organised on Sunday 22 May 2023. The corresponding webpage can be accessed here.
Description of the Tracing Day 2023
Context and objectives of the event
Soil and water resources that are essential to human and aquatic life are increasingly threatened by human activities and the impacts of land use and climate change. Sediment and sediment-associated constituents, in particular, can contribute substantially to water-quality impairment. In order to take effective conservation measures to protect these resources from erosion and alteration, and use them in a more sustainable way, a preliminary assessment is needed to: (1) quantify soil losses; (2) identify the sources and the pathways of runoff and sediment across the landscapes to the river systems; and (3) calculate the transfer and residence times of sediment and particle-bound contaminants in the river network.
Several innovative techniques have been developed recently opening up new avenues to establish this assessment of sediment flux in the critical zone. These innovative techniques include the tracing or “fingerprinting” methods to identify the sources and quantify the dynamics of sediment and particle-bound contaminants, high resolution topographic mapping using various emerging technologies (i.e Lidar) to map connectivity and sediment pathways, the development and installation of multiple low-cost sensors in the rivers. However, the use of these techniques is often associated with several methodological and statistical limitations, that are often reported although rarely addressed in the framework of concerted actions taken at the level of the international scientific community. Among the main methodological difficulties associated with these techniques are the following:
- conservativeness of tracers during the erosion to delivery cycle;
- collection and representativeness of sampling in the field;
- use of correction factors to remove the effect associated with differences in particle size or organic matter content between source and target samples;
- Bayesian versus multivariate statistical analyses;
- calibration of sensors/samplers installed in the field/in rivers;
- validation and uncertainty of model results.
In this context, the objective of this Thematic Scientific Meeting Day is to bring together international experts working on these topics together. It is organised to follow-up the discussions initiated during specifically dedicated sessions organised during the last years at the General Assembly of the European Geoscience Union (EGU) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU). This event will take place on Sunday 23 April 2023 – just before the 2023 edition of the EGU conference starts – to facilitate the participation of European and non-European colleagues and minimize the environmental impact of the meeting. In the future, we hope that other similar events will be organised in the framework of international conferences (e.g. EGU 2024) to continue stimulating discussions about this topic in coming years.
Audience
Researchers/lecturers, postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and MSc students.
Around 25 participants are expected.
The official language of the Thematic Day will be English.
Logistics
The event will take place at the
University of Vienna (Neues Institütsgebaüde)
(Subway station U2 Schottentor)
Universitätsstrasse 7 – 5th floor – Lecture Hall HS 5A
1010 Wien
It will be organised on Sunday 23 April from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm just before the opening of the EGU General Assembly on Monday 24 April 2023.
Link to the website of the EGU General Assembly 2023
To plan your journey and identify the best itinerary to the Tracing Day in Vienna, please consult the Wiener Linien transport website.
Participation cost
The participation to the event will be free, and the intention is to provide free-of-charge coffee breaks and a lunch to the confirmed participants. All the participants should have registered in advance through contacting the organisers (Sabine Kraushaar and Olivier Evrard). No participation in hybrid mode will be possible.
Programme of the Tracing Day
9:30 – 10:00 Welcome coffee/tea
10:00 – 10:10 General introduction by the organisers
10:10 – 10:35 First lecture by Simon Vale (new sediment tracing developments in New Zealand)
10:35 –11:00 Second lecture by Jean Minella (overview of sediment tracing in Brazil and South America)
11:00 – 11:25 Third lecture by Enrique Munoz Arcos (using fallout radionuclides to quantify sediment residence times)
11:25-11:50 Fourth lecture by Rémi Bizeul (comparing approaches for tracer selection)
11:50- 12:05 General discussion
12:05 – 13:30 Lunch break
13:30 – 14:00 Opening lecture on isotopic analyses at VERA/Vienna (Silke Merchel)
14:00 – 15:00 Sharing our tracing datasets and update on the proposition to organise a tracing inter-comparison exercise
15:00 – 16:00 General discussion on the proposed tracing inter-comparison exercise
16:00 – 16:30 Final conclusions and ideas for ongoing collaborations