Abstract
Soil loss by erosion processes is one of the largest challenges for food production and reservoir siltation around the world. Information on sediment, nutrients and pollutants is required for designing effective control strategies. The estimation of sediment sources is difficult to get using conventional techniques, but sediment fingerprinting is a potentially valuable tool. This procedure intends to develop methods that enable to identify the apportionment of sediment sources from sediment mixtures. We developed a new tool to quantify the provenance of sediments in an agroforest catchment. For the first time, the procedure for the selection of the best combination of tracers was included in the tool package. An unmixing model algorithm is applied to the sediment samples to estimate the contribution of each possible source. The operations are compiled in an R package named FingerPro, which unmixes sediment samples after selecting the optimum set of tracers. An example from a well-studied Mediterranean catchment is included in the package to test the model. The sediment source apportionments are compared with previous results of soil redistributions where 137Cs derived rates validate the unmixing results, highlighting the potential of sediment fingerprinting for quantifying the main sediment provenance. Fingerprinting techniques will allow us to better comprehend sediment transport to water ecosystems and reservoirs and its detrimental effect on the quality of the water and aquatic habitats. The FingerPro package provides further understanding of the unmixing procedure through the use of graphical and statistical tools, offering a broader and easier application of the technique.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by project PID2019-104857RB-I00 funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the aid of a predoctoral contract BES-2015-071780 of the project CGL2014-52986-R.
Availability of Data, Material and Code Availability
The R package source files are available via:
GitHub platform: https://github.com/eead-csic-eesa/fingerPro
Name of code: fingerPro
Name of the manual: fingerPro_manual 1.2.pdf
Developer and contact address:
Ivan Lizaga Villuendas (lizaga.ivan10@gmail.com) / Borja Latorre (borja.latorre@csic.es)
Year first available: 2018
Software required: R Program language: R
Funding
This work has been supported by project CGL2014–52986-R funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the aid of a predoctoral contract (BES-2015-071780).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Ivan Lizaga: Conceptualization, Writing - Original Draft, Software, Data Curation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources; Borja Latorre: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Software, Supervision, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources; Leticia Gaspar: Conceptualization, Validation, Data Curation, Investigation, Resources, Writing - review & editing; Ana Navas: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition.
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Lizaga, I., Latorre, B., Gaspar, L. et al. FingerPro: an R Package for Tracking the Provenance of Sediment. Water Resour Manage 34, 3879–3894 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-020-02650-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-020-02650-0