Abstract
Rivers transport dissolved and solid loads from terrestrial realms to the oceans and between inland reservoirs, representing major mass fluxes on Earth's surface. The composition of river water and sediment provides clues to a plethora of Earth and environmental processes, including weathering, erosion, nutrient and carbon cycling, environmental pollution, reservoir exchange, and tectonic cycles. While there are documented, publicly available databases for riverine dissolved and suspended nutrients, there is no openly accessible, georeferenced database for riverine suspended sediment composition. Here, we present a globally representative set of 2828 suspended and bed sediment compositional measurements from 1683 locations around the globe. This database, named Global River Sediments (GloRiSe) version 1.1, includes major, minor and trace elements, along with mineralogical data, and provides time series for some sites. Each observation is complemented by metadata describing geographic location, sampling date and time, sample treatment, and measurement details, which allows for grouping and selection of observations, as well as for interoperability with external data sources, and improves interpretability. Information on references, unit conversion and references makes the database comprehensible. Notably, the close to globe-spanning extent of this compilation allows the derivation of data-driven, spatially resolved global-scale conclusions about the role of rivers and processes related to them within the Earth system. GloRiSe version 1.1 can be downloaded from Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.4485795, Muller et al., 2021) and GitHub (https://github.com/GerritMuller/GloRiSe, last access: 26 May 2021), where updates with adapted version numbers will become available, along with a technical documentation and an example calculation in the form of MATLAB scripts, which calculate the sediment-flux-weighted major element composition of the annual riverine suspended sediment export to the ocean and related uncertainties.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3565-3575 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Earth System Science Data |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 29 Jul 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Acknowledgements. This work was carried out under the programme of the Netherlands Earth System Science Centre (NESSC), financially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW). Appy Sluijs thanks the European Research Council for Consolidator Grant 771497. We thank Eduardo A. F. Garzanti, Dennis D. Eberl, Grace Andrews, Jérôme Viers and Volker Rachold for clarifying details and searching metadata related to their publications, which were included in the database. These researchers, along with Jens Hartmann, Gibran Romero-Mujalli and Stefan Kempe, are furthermore thanked for discussion and suggestions. We thank Olivier J. T. Sulpis for advice regarding the codes and Gibran Romero-Mujalli for advice regarding database structure and compatibility. Svenja Trapp is thanked for testing user friendliness of the database.
Funding Information:
Financial support. This research has been supported by the European Commission, Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (NESSC (grant no. 847504) and an ERC Consolidator Grant (SPANC, no. 771497, awarded to AS)).
Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright:
Funding
Acknowledgements. This work was carried out under the programme of the Netherlands Earth System Science Centre (NESSC), financially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW). Appy Sluijs thanks the European Research Council for Consolidator Grant 771497. We thank Eduardo A. F. Garzanti, Dennis D. Eberl, Grace Andrews, Jérôme Viers and Volker Rachold for clarifying details and searching metadata related to their publications, which were included in the database. These researchers, along with Jens Hartmann, Gibran Romero-Mujalli and Stefan Kempe, are furthermore thanked for discussion and suggestions. We thank Olivier J. T. Sulpis for advice regarding the codes and Gibran Romero-Mujalli for advice regarding database structure and compatibility. Svenja Trapp is thanked for testing user friendliness of the database. Financial support. This research has been supported by the European Commission, Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (NESSC (grant no. 847504) and an ERC Consolidator Grant (SPANC, no. 771497, awarded to AS)).
Keywords
- River
- suspended sediment
- geochemistry
- mineralogy
- petrography
- weathering
- erosion
- database
