The goal of this session is to bring together scholars conducting innovative research on the interrelations between fluvial sedimentary processes and morphodynamics of rivers and estuaries, at time scales including Quaternary, historical and the present-day perspective.

Sediment budgets are indispensable for understanding and predicting the morphological behavior of rivers and estuaries. They describe the balance between the amount of sediment entering a study area, the amount of sediment leaving the study area and the change in the amount of sediment stored in the study area itself. In this way, they provide answers to essential questions such as “Where are sediments coming from?”, “Where are eroded sediments going to?” and “How are morphological processes in source areas, rivers and estuaries linked to each other?.”

Whereas sediment budgets focusing on the finest part of the sediment load, the so-called wash load, prove to be very helpful for understanding river behavior, it remains essential to build sediment budgets focusing on the morphologically-relevant sediment load, consisting of the bed load plus the coarsest part of the suspended load.

An excellent basis for constructing sediment budgets for the morphologically-relevant sediment load is provided by new, innovative sediment monitoring techniques that produce accurate sediment load data with a high spatial and temporal resolution. On the other hand, it has also become possible to estimate the morphologically-relevant sediment load with numerical models. Such approaches can account for all governing processes, including bed armoring, bed form development, bank erosion, abrasion, intermittent suspension, resuspension, consolidation and hindered settling.

This session contains presentations on sedimentary processes and morphodynamics, particularly sediment budgets, channel metamorphosis, process dynamics of near-bed sediment transport and innovative sediment monitoring techniques. Contributions are based on field measurements, flume experiments and numerical modeling, with a special focus on the morphologically-relevant transport of gravel, sand, silt and clay.