Sediment yields from small, steep coastal watersheds of California

• Global inventories lack river sediment discharge from smallest watersheds.
• Small watershed sediment yields were highly variable in space and time.
• Roughly half the annual sediment discharge occurred in one day per year.

Study regionCoastal watersheds of southern California, United States.Study focusWe sought to better understand the rates and variability of suspended-sediment discharge from small coastal watersheds (<100 km2) of California. Suspended-sediment concentrations and stream discharge were measured with automated samplers near the mouths of four small watersheds (10–56 km2).New hydrological insights for the regionThe watersheds were found to have suspended-sediment concentrations that extended over five orders of magnitude (1 to over 100,000 mg L−1). Sediment concentrations were weakly correlated with discharge (r2 = 0.10–0.25), and four types of hysteresis patterns were observed during high flow events (clockwise, counterclockwise, no hysteresis, and complex). Annual sediment yields varied by 400-fold across the four watersheds (e.g., 5–2100 t km−2 yr −1 during the 2003–2006 water years), and sediment discharge was measurably elevated in one watershed that was partially burned by a late summer wildfire. Dozens of high flow events provided evidence that suspended-sediment yields were generally related to peak stream discharge and event-based precipitation, although these relationships were not consistent across the watersheds. This suggests that watersheds smaller than 100 km2 can provide large – and therefore important – fluxes of sediment to the coast, but that simple techniques to estimate sediment loads, such as sediment rating curves, hydrologic regressions, and extrapolation using global sediment yield relationships that include watershed area as a primary factor, may provide poor results.

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