Review of Proceedings of the Eighth Federal Interagency Sedimentation Conference

The Eighth Federal Interagency Sedimentation Conference was held April 2–6, 2006, in Reno, Nevada. Proceedings and individual conference papers can be downloaded for free at www.jfic.org. The next Federal Interagency Sedimentation Conference will be held in mid-2010 in conjunction with the Federal Interagency Hydrologic Modeling Conference. The conference was sponsored by the Subcommittee on Sedimentation, which is chartered under the Advisory Committee on Water Information of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The conference included a wide range of presentations on many sedimentation issues, including sediment yield and transport, sediment and wildlife habitat, watershed modeling, reservoir sedimentation, dam removal and rehabilitation geomorphology, stream restoration, sediment surrogates, instrumentation and turbidity, and sediment tracers.

Several notable papers were presented on the sediment yield and transportation applications of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s GSTARS-1D model by Jianchun Huang, Blair Greimann, Travis Bauer, and Chris Holmquist-Johnson, and estimates of hillside erosion and sediment yield in Southern California by Peter Wohlgemuth. The proceedings also included interesting papers on stable channel design, such as one presented by Martin Teal and Phillip Anderson. Additional papers were presented on sediment transport computations in HEC-RAS, including the incorporation of HEC6 and the use of a new sediment analysis tool known as SIAM. These papers were presented by Stan Gibson and Charles Little Jr. of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and David Mooney of the Bureau of Reclamation.

A wide range of topics are contained within the proceedings. These include papers on gravel bed transport in mountain streams and the use of tracers in determining erosional processes. Kristen Bunte presented two noteworthy papers on bed load measurement and prediction of bed load rating curves from different basin parameters.

Stream restoration and geomorphology papers presented in the proceedings were very well received during the conference. Different approaches for river restoration and stream channel design were discussed by David Rosgen and Douglas Shields. Chester Watson presented a paper on river restoration on Judy’s Branch, a small stream located in Illinois. Chris Thornton et al. presented a detailed research effort related to Bendway Weirs. Tim Randle presented a paper on predicting river meandering, and Craig Boroughs et al. presented a computational model on the development of sediment plugs.

Papers on turbidity and sediment tracers and the use of sediment surrogates were excellent. These included a paper by David Topping et al. on the use of a laser diffraction instrument and an acoustic system to model suspended sediment concentrations in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Gary Wall et al. provided an exceptional paper on the use of ACCP to compute sediment discharge in the tidal area of the Hudson River in New York. Roger Kunle et al. contributed a paper on the prediction of grain size of suspended sediment using single-frequency acoustic backscatter.

The Proceedings are an excellent compendium of a wide range of topics related to sediment. Practitioners from private industry, universities, and government contributed fascinating papers to the Proceedings, and all who have an interest in sedimentation will find the Proceedings to be very worthwhile.