Research Fellow
Integrated modelling, sediment budget modelling, road erosion modelling, sediment tracing
E-mail: baihua.fu@anu.edu.au

Dr Baihua Fu is now a Research Fellow in iCAM, Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU. She completed her PhD study in December 2008 at the Fenner School. She has published five conference and two journal papers during her study, in areas such as integrated modelling, sediment budget modelling, road erosion modelling and sediment tracing. She is also currently a member of the ANU Water Initiative, Canberra R Users Group, and the coordinator of the Fenner School Seminar Series. Identifying sources of suspended sediment at catchment scale is essential in order to prioritise erosion control. Despite the rapid development of techniques for identifying sediment sources, the integration of information derived from different techniques is rarely practised.

My PhD study covered an integrated approach to monitoring, tracing and modelling to identify the sources of suspended sediment in two coastal catchments in southeastern Australia: the Moruya-Deua and Tuross River catchments. A Weight-of-Evidence approach, adapted from that for risk assessment, was developed to integrate the information from three Lines-of-Evidence:

1) stream monitoring and an analysis of aerial photographs;

2) geochemical and mineralogical sediment tracing for stream junctions; and

3) catchment-scale sediment budget modelling for road, hillslope, gully and streambank erosion.

Compared to individual techniques, the integrated results produced a more confident estimation of the sources of suspended sediment in the study catchments. This research demonstrated an integrated, quantitative and systematic methodology, and it maximised the utilisation of sediment source information that is often available, or can be easily obtained for many catchments in Australia.