Fluvial clastic sediment yield in Canada: scaled analysis

This report presents a set of maps of regional fluvial sediment yield in Ca nada, based mainly on the Water Survey of Canada archive of riverine suspen ded sediment observations. Regional scaling relations for the variation of suspended sediment load with drainage basin area are established to permit data to be adjusted to common areal bases for portrayal of regional variati ons. For most regions, the specific sediment yield increases downstream, in dicating regional degradation of river valleys. In the southern prairies, h owever, regional aggradation is occurring, and in southern Ontario similar quantities of fluvial sediment are apparently being yielded, on average, ov er all scales in the landscape. A smoothed regional portrayal of the result s is obtained by kriging, which also yields error estimates for locally pre dicted values of sediment yield. Maps are presented for the standard areas of 1 km(2), 10(2) km(2) (10 km + 10 km), and 10(4) km(2) (10(2) km + 10(2) km).