When added to the models, interaction coefficients between land use variables and time are positive, implying that land use effects have not been reduced by improving practices over time. Detailed and long-term monitoring of lake catchment systems may be necessary for further explaining environmental controls and ongoing land use impacts on sediment delivery processes. Sediment transfer from small, upland OTX015 supplier catchments is of broad interest because of disproportionate delivery to continental margins (Milliman and Syvitski, 1992 and Dearing and Jones, 2003), and is of local interest because of effects on downstream water quality and health

of aquatic ecosystems (Kerr, 1995 and Miller et al., 1997). Although sediment accumulation is highly variable among lake catchments across the Canadian cordillera, we show that trends in sedimentation relate to cumulative land use and, to a lesser degree, climate change. We used mixed effects modeling to analyze our dataset

of lake catchment sedimentation and environmental change to account for the significant amount of inter-catchment variability in sedimentation processes, both spatially and temporally, that we could not assess deterministically. Increased densities Selleckchem Dorsomorphin of roads and forest clearing were associated with increased sedimentation for the full lake catchment inventory. Land use effects were more difficult to discern for the Foothills-Alberta Plateau subset of catchments; although, cumulative impacts associated with both forestry and energy extraction were still detected. The relation between road density and sedimentation was the most consistent and robust of all fixed effects across catchments ranging in area, relief, and physiographic region. Stronger relations were obtained from whole catchment measures of land use density, suggesting that the fine sediment fraction is efficiently transferred from hillslopes to the central lake basin in these upland watersheds. Climate change was also related to sedimentation rates, with better model

fits obtained for seasonal temperatures than for precipitation. The analysis of lake sediments will likely continue LY294002 to be important for establishing long-term patterns of sediment transfer, especially for remote upland regions, where there is little availability of monitoring data. Our inventory of lake sedimentation and environmental change in the lake catchment is one of the largest such datasets (104 lakes) in the literature, and it is unique in its incorporation of consistently developed histories of environmental change spanning over half a century. Future modeling efforts should further assess sediment transfer connectivity from hillslopes and use techniques that accommodate complex sediment responses that may result from multiple forcing factors (e.g. Simpson and Anderson, 2009).