Quantifying and understanding the human impacts on catchment sediment yield at the global scale

Sediment fluxes are an important component of a wide variety of Earth system processes and global biogeochemical cycles. Human activities on land and within the river system (e.g. land use and land cover changes, reservoirs, and mining) have considerable impacts on natural sediment fluxes, however these impacts are complex, scale-dependent and often counteracting, and remain poorly understood. The overarching goal of this thesis is thus to quantify the degree of human impacts on contemporary sediment yield (SY) for small to large catchments at a global scale, by compiling contemporary SY observations and developing a global natural 'baseline' catchment SY model.