Proceedings of the Federal Interagency Workshop
"Sediment Technology for the 21st Century"
Organized by:
John Gray, U.S. Geological
Survey
Larry Schmidt, U.S. Forest Service
February 17-19,1998
St. Petersburg,
Florida
(Larger Version, 388K JPEG)
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About this photograph: USGS Tampa Bay 3/22/91 Landsat TM satellite
imagery Bands 7,2,1 processed at Center for Coastal
Geology, St. Petersburg, Florida |
SYNOPSIS
The workshop, "Sediment Technology for the 21'st Century" was held to
bring better focus to sediment technology needs and development
activities of, or relevant to the U.S. Government. This need was
articulated in a 1997 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Sediment
Workshop,
http://water.usgs.gov/osw/techniques/workshop,
in which 11 U.S. agencies unanimously concurred that new sediment
technologies -- better, less-expensive, safer and/or more
statistically defensible -- are needed for effective management of
our Nation's rivers, estuaries, and coasts. The Technical Committee
of the Federal Interagency Sedimentation Project, which includes the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of
Reclamation, Agricultural Research Service, Forest Service (FS),
and USGS, agreed. To this end, the Technical Committee resolved
to
sponsor a short workshop on the subject.
Thus was the "Sediment Technology for the 21'st Century" workshop
conceived.
The workshop was organized by John Gray of the USGS and Larry Schmidt
of the FS. Representatives from all Technical Committee member
agencies other than the Bureau of Land Management attended. Five
sediment experts from four universities provided a much-needed
non-Federal perspective (click here for the
workshop attendance list and associated
contact
information).
Among the objectives addressed in the workshop were the following
five:
- Articulate the sediment research and monitoring needs of the
participating organizations.
- Identify existing or emerging
sediment-related technologies and compelling ideas.
- Identify principal investigators working toward similar
technological ends. Have them summarize progress on the
topical area and recommend a path-of-least-resistance toward
bringing the technology to fruition through development of
pre-proposals.
- Identify potential cross-agency partnerships and develop a
multi-agency plan to initiate projects on promising
technologies or ideas, realizing that sharing resources should
result in a large return on investment to contributing
agencies.
- Provide information to place our results on the World Wide Web
and hopefully publish them internationally to stimulate
world-wide discussion on the sediment technology of the
U.S. and of other countries.
The scope of the workshop centered on any sediment technology
of potential relevance to member agencies of the Technical
Committee. These included,- optical, acoustical, laser, or
other technologies to measure,
- suspended-sediment concentration, size distributions, shape, and
other physical parameters; diatoms and other algae (including
chlorophyll); bedload; bed topography, by,
- remote or manual means, operated in,
- real-time, time-lagged, synoptic, or other modes in a,
- field or laboratory setting.
Sessions on February 17 and 18 were focused on
information transfer, which included technical presentations on
methods and technologies by principal investigators (click here for abstracts from the
presentations). On February 19th, attendees met in two
subgroups: One centered on technologies for measuring suspended
sediment, the other on the combined topic of bedload and bed
topography. Both groups were asked to identify technological
"gaps" in addition to the status of technology under
their purview.
The subgroups completed a 1-page synposis for
each of 25 promising
technologies; prioritized them; and
initiated development of pre-proposals for those technologies
considered most compelling and/or tractable. The draft pre-proposals can be accessed by
clicking here. One technological "gap" was identified:
Measuring bedload transport in coarse-bedded
channelsremotely.
The pre-proposals will be presented at the
joint meeting of Subcommittee on Sedimentation and the Technical
Committee on May 12-14, 1998, at the USGS National Center in
Reston, Virginia. The Technical Committee will be asked to
evaluate the technologies and make a determination on which, if
any, warrant development into full proposals. The Technical
Committee will also be asked to identify potential cross-agency
partnerships and to develop a multi-agency plan to initiate
projects on technologies considered most worthwhile to the
Federal Government.
WORKSHOP CONTRIBUTIONS
- Workshop
Abstracts
- Workshop
Preproposals
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