Sediment sources, source-to-sink fluxes and sedimentary budgets

Climate change, human activity and other environmental disturbances can affect Earth surface systems via alteration of vegetation cover, hydrologic regime, permafrost distribution, and glacier fluctuations. For example, Pleistocene temperature drop had profound climatic and geomorphic influences worldwide, including abrupt glacial advance in vast terrestrial areas that have both sculpted the topography and deposited extensive mantles of glacigenic materials. In consideration of such legacies, formerly glaciated landscapes today can be considered at a unique stage of readjustment (recovery) with respect to the spatial organization of currently active geomorphic process domains (Brardinoni and Hassan, 2006), and the magnitude and patterns of sediment fluxes (Church and Slaymaker, 1989; Hewitt et al., 2002;Warburton, 2007). Accordingly, both contemporary environmental changes and disturbances over the Quaternary are significantly influencing patterns of weathering, detachment, transport, and deposition of material across landscape components. It is a challenge to develop a better understanding of how such changes and disturbances interact to modulate sedimentary source-to-sink fluxes and budgets in the light of peculiar landscape sensitivities (Slaymaker et al., 2009).