Benefits to the Community Soil loss is an important practical problem. In the longer term, a proper understanding of environmental history, gained in part from the study of landscape changes, is essential in order to understand the significance of the substantial changes that humans are effecting. Sediment transfer models enable us to understand the erosional impacts of land development and disturbance, to trace persistent, sediment-associated contaminants, and to better understand the landscape around us. The project is particularly well suited for graduate education because it provides a wide range of projects for students, ranging from field investigation of sedimentation trends in Fraser estuary over the century since the development of river training works, to the development of a mathematical model of landscape evolution on the time scale of up to a million years. Both of these are current PhD projects.
Specific projects gain other support.
A project to inventory sediment transport data for British Columbia is funded by the British Columbia Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks. Future Plans Current plans for empirical work are to obtain the complete, detailed sediment budget for a drainage basin of order one thousand square kilometres in area. This will provide a data set for more detailed modelling and will, incidentally, substantially expand practical knowledge of drainage basin sediment transfers which are important to understand in the context of forest land use. A candidate basin is Chilliwack River basin, near Vancouver. References Church, M. and O. Slaymaker, O., 1989.