Mass Transfers and Sedimentary Budgets in Geomorphologic Drainage Basin Studies

Geomorphologic processes, operating at the Earth surface and being responsible for transferring sediments and effecting landform change, are highly dependent on climate, and it is anticipated that climate change will have a major impact on the behaviour of Earth surface systems. Accordingly is geomorphologic research on mass transfers in a variety of different climatic environments represented by a substantial body of literature. Studies on mass transfers and sedimentary source-to-sink fluxes generally refer to the development of sedimentary budgets. A sediment budget is an accounting of the sources and disposition of sediment as it travels from its point of origin to its eventual exit from a defined landscape unit like a drainage basin (e.g. Reid & Dunne, 1996). Accordingly, the development of a sediment budget necessitates the identification of processes of weathering, erosion, transport and storage / deposition within a defined area, and their rates and controls (Reid & Dunne, 1996; Slaymaker, 2000; Beylich & Warburton, 2007). A thorough understanding of the current sediment production and flux regime within a system is fundamental to predict likely effects of changes to the system, whether climatic induced or human-influenced. Source-to-sink sedimentary flux and sediment budget research therefore enables the prediction of changes to erosion and sedimentation rates, knowledge of where sediment will be deposited, how long it will be stored and how much sediment will be remobilised (Gurnell & Clark, 1987; Reid & Dunne, 1996; Beylich & Warburton, 2007). Sedimentary mass transfers move eroded sediments from their source area to an area of temporal storage or long-term deposition in sinks. Rates of sediment transfer are not only conditioned by competence of geomorphic processes but also by the availability of sediment for transport. Accordingly, in assessing sediment transfer we need to quantify the forces, which drive transport processes but equally account for the factors, which control sediment supply (e.g. Ballantyne, 2002; Warburton, 2007). Small-scale geomorphologic process and sediment budget studies focus on sedimentary fluxes from areas of weathering and erosion to areas of storage within defined landscape units like drainage basins (Beylich & Warburton, 2007; Beylich & Kneisel, 2009), whereas large-scale sediment systems couple headwaters to oceanic sinks. The identification of storage elements and sinks is critical to the effective study and understanding of source-to-sink sedimentary fluxes (Reid & Dunne, 1996). The setting of a