Soil erosion from hillslopes in hydrological watersheds, one of the most serious problems of today's world, consists of motion of soil particles detached by factors such as rainfall, runoff, wind and transported within flow to finally be deposited either at a downstream section of the river with a lower topographical slope or in a downstream river reservoir. The dead storage volume of river reservoirs is of great importance in the design work. It is such a volume that accomodates the sediment trapped by and accumulated in the reservoir. Neither underestimation nor overestimation of this volume is desired as the underestimation shortens the economical project life of the reservoir and the overestimation results in unneccessary costs.

Numerous methods are available to quantify that amount of sediment. This might be either by analysing a time series; correlating the collection of available data; employing empirical approaches and traditional equations; monitoring, sampling, surveying; or remote sensing and using geographical information systems. Additionally, process-based hydrological watershed models accomodate erosion and sediment transport modules in which sediment, eroded by rainfall or flow, and transported, over the hillslope and through the existing river channel, to the reservoir can be predicted. Also soft computational techniques such as artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms and wavelet functions were found useful in establishing a model for forecasting or simulation purposes.

The general topic deals with the modeling of sediment transport in hydrological watersheds, knowing that erosion / sediment transport is a major problem in the Mediterranean countries. This is a widely studied area, but the modeling sediment transport is a domain with less specific and largely used knowledge. Thus the general objective of this meeting is to gather not only regional but also worldwide researchers and practitioners working on this topic at different scales of time and space, in order to identify and compare tools and methodologies applied in the region and other parts in the world, and to edit the main contributions as a set of papers to give future studies a good overview.

Any topic related to modeling sediment transport will be the issue of the meeting. Some sub-topics to be concerned are as follows:

- mathematical models

           * empirical models

           * conceptual models

           * process-based models

- stochastic (time series) models

- data-driven soft computational models (ANN, Fuzzy logic, GA, wavelet, etc.)

- GIS- and RS-supported models

- mathematical problems in modeling of sediment transport

- conceptual and numerical modeling schemes useful in the area of sediment transport (finite differences, finite elements, etc.)

- spatial and temporal scale issues in modeling of sediment transport

- socio-economic and other “non conventional” data input in modeling of sediment transport

- sediment transport in arid and semi-arid region watersheds

Literature

For an up-to-date literature review on hydrology and sediment transport models, here is a brief list:

You can also check this summary: