Quantifying the provenance of aeolian sediments using multiple composite fingerprints

Monte Carlo fingerprinting of the terrestrial sources of different particle size fractions of coastal sediment deposits using geochemical tracers: some lessons for the user community

“…To date, the approach has been most widely used to identify fluvial sediment sources in river catchments in different hydro-climatic settings (Collins et al 1997(Collins et al , 2012Walling et al 1999;Russell et al 2001;Mukundan et al 2012;Haddadchi et al 2013;Franz et al 2014;Pulley and Collins 2018;Le Gall et al 2016;Tiecher et al 2018;Koiter et al 2013;Zhang et al 2017). Its application in aeolian geomorphology has emerged much more recently (Liu et al 2016a;Gholami et al 2017aGholami et al , 2017bWang et al 2017;Dahmardeh Behrooz et al 2019), but there remains scope to continue testing the applicability of different tracers for discriminating and apportioning the contributions of critical sources to those coastal sediment deposits, within an uncertainty framework. In brief, sediment fingerprinting involves collecting target sediment samples and comparing their measured tracer properties with those of potential sediment sources.…”

Sediment Source Fingerprinting of the Lake Urmia Sand Dunes

“…Hence, sediment tracers as a technique to complete the shortcomings of traditional erosion or deposition processes measurements have been increased due to the complementary information they make. The application and soundness of sediment fingerprinting techniques using a broad range of materials and soil properties such as major and minor elements as well as particles mineralogy 49 , 50 , 66 , 86 , 87 , fallout radionuclides 48 , 82 , 88 – 91 , rare earth elements and soil magnetism 66 , 92 – 95 and organic and biological materials plus biomarkers 46 , 96 – 98 have been evaluated in numerous studies 99 . In the present study, the sample preparation and geochemical analysis of major and trace elements were performed at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.…”

Sediment source fingerprinting: benchmarking recent outputs, remaining challenges and emerging themes

“…A range of techniques has been used to investigate key dust sources for targeting remedial action including, amongst others, data mining with ensemble or individual models (Gholami et al 2020a , b ), remote sensing (Filonchyk et al 2018 ), comparison of strontium ( 87 Sr/ 86 Sr) or neodymium ( 143 Nd/ 144 Nd) ratios (Yang et al 2008 ; Saitoh et al 2011 ), rare earth elements (Dukes et al 2018 ) and detrital zircon ages or heavy mineral composition (Garzanti et al 2013 ; Fyhn et al 2019 ). Since 2016, however, there has been a growing interest in applying sediment source tracing procedures using linear mixing models (Liu et al 2016 ; Gholami et al 2017a ; Wang et al 2017 ; Zhao et al 2020 ; Niu et al 2020 ), Monte Carlo simulation (Gholami et al 2019b ), Bayesian approaches (Gholami et al 2017b , 2019a ) and generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) model (Behrooz et al 2019 ; Telfer et al 2020 ; Gholami et al 2020c ). A key step that differs from applications tracing fluvial sediment sources concerns the need to take explicit account of the dominant wind direction to inform source material and target sediment sampling.…”