Environmental and human impacts on sediment transport of the largest Asian rivers of Russia and China

Assessment of suspended sediment load variability in the Tonle Sap and Lower Mekong Rivers, Cambodia

“…Displaying a different trend, the largest rivers of North and East Asia (Russia and China), such as Yenisei, Amur, Yellow, Yangtze, Pearl Rivers have experienced suspended sediment load reduction attributed to sediment trapping by dams (Chalov et al, 2018). An earlier study by Liu et al (2007) found that major rivers in Southern China (e.g., Yangtze, Qiantang, and Pearl rivers)…”

“…Recent studies have shown substantial changes in water and sediment fluxes for rivers globally from prior decades (Li et al, 2020). The largest rivers of the North and East Asia in Russia and China, such as Amur, Yellow, Yangtze, Pearl, evinced sediment load changes due to human impacts (Chalov et al, 2018). Rivers with high relief and erodible lithologies like the Ganges, Danube and Amazon Rivers are likely to respond to higher than average precipitation with increased sediment yields (Cohen et al, 2014).…”

Towards an advanced observation system for the marine Arctic in the framework of the Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX)

“…Data from communitybased observing could potentially be aggregated to generate larger-scale overviews of, for instance, species range and phenology, habitat condition, opportunities and threats, the impacts of management interventions, and the delivery of benefits such as wildlife resources to the community members from the natural ecosystems. As well as providing data to inform natural resource management decisions, community-based observing has the potential to shed valuable light on environmental changes at national and even pan-Arctic scales (Huntington et al, 2013;Chandler et al, 2016). The Greenland example described above is one such system currently in development, which has been explicitly designed to allow such upwards movement of data and ultimately to permit larger-scale analyses.…”

Response to the comments by Referee 2

“…The main datasets are based on regional studies recently performed in the Lena (Hölemann et al, 2005), Ob (Shakhova et al, 2007), and Amur rivers (Levshina, 2008;Chudaeva et al, 2011) and summarized in reviews (Savenko, 2006;Bagard et al, 2011;Pokrovsky et al, 2015). The existing datasets underestimate the fluxes of particulate heavy metals from the Siberian rivers to the Arctic Ocean due to sampling infrequency and uncertainties in sampling procedures (Chalov et al, 2018). To improve estimates of fluvial export, multiyear chemical datasets from a coordinated sampling programme have been collected since 2003 under the Arctic-GRO programme at the six largest Arctic rivers (Holmes et al, 2012;McClelland et al, 2016).…”