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Book reviews

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on the boundary between geomorphology and hydrogeology. Maybe the small scales of hillslopes and soil profiles are under-represented here, but otherwise this is a helpful collection of material, no doubt to be followed by more specialized - but less varied - offerings as research on this theme continues,
Tim Burt University of Oxford, UK

Changing River Channels edited by Angela Gurnell & Geoffrey Petts


published 1995 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Baffins Lane, Chichester, West Sussex P019 1UD, UK, 442 + xviii pp; price 65; ISBN 0-471-95727-5.

This is the first of two companion edited books to mark the internationally recognized contribution of Professors K. J. Gregory and D. E. Walling,The book is a tribute to the British fluvial and catchment geomorphologist Professor K. Gregory, written by colleagues and former students. It represents a record of recent research on changing channels by members of a geographical school of which Professor Gregory has been the leading influence. Although inevitably reflecting the interest and specializations of the individual authors, the book nevertheless achieves a balanced approach and may surprise readers by the range of topics which now make up the theme of changing channels. It opens with a background introduction by Professor G. Petts to the geographical approach; this stresses field science and the application of classification and description to establishing functional relationships between landforms, processes and other environmental variables over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. It then divides into four parts. In Part I (Temporal and Spatial Dimensions), five chapters discuss historical changes in Europe and the UK during the Holocene (post-glacial period), channel networks, planform change and meandering channels, and crosssectional change. In Part II (Processes of Change), there are five chapters on suspended sediment yields in a changing environment, bedload transport, catchment sediment budgets, the impact of large woody debris, and interactions between vegetation and hydrological and geomorphological processes along river corridors. Part III (Information for the Management of Change) contains five chapters on information flow for channel management, the use of remotely sensed data, information from topographic survey, channel geometry-discharge relationships, and channel classification for management. Part IV (Management for Change) presents three chapters on channel restoration, planning for a sustainable water environment, and the use of geomorphology in environmental design. Some of the chapters contain important new material, others are continuing explorations of favourite areas of study. There is a natural bias towards British authorship but many of the contributions are set in an international context. Although written largely from a geographical perspective, the book contains useful material for those concerned with problems of channel engineering and management, for example the impacts of land use and climate change on channel change. Overall it should therefore be of interest to research workers and to enquiring minds among those with a practical interest in channel change. The wide range of topics, the active developments in these topics and the eminence achieved by the various authors in their fields highlight the rich legacy of research which Professor Gregory has fostered in fluvial geomorphology. However, the range of topics is also such that few readers are

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Book reviews

likely to read the whole book; most will want to concentrate on those chapters close to their own interests. They may similarly wish to balance their study with the findings of research schools from other countries.
James C. Bathurst Water Resource Systems Research Unit University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Sediment and Water Quality in River Catchments edited by Ian Foster, Angela Gurnell & Bruce

Webb

published 1995 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Baffins Lane, Chichester, West Sussex P019 1UD, UK; 472 pp; price 65; ISBN 0471-957275.

This is the second of two companion edited books to mark the internationally recognized contribution of Professors K. J. Gregory and D. E. Walling. This book very much reflects the hydrological and geomorphological interests pursued by Professor D. E. Walling and inspired by him in others. All the contributors have been associated with him (students and academic collaborators) in Britain and overseas. The volume parallels Des Walling's career and academic contribution, and is arranged into six sections. The first section (Quantity and Quality Dimensions) focuses attention on the quantity and the quality of river runoff, principally in southeast Devon. T. J. Browne provides an excellent review of the role of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in hydrology as a tool for more general modelling of solutes in drainage basins. H. Rodda shows how a model of nitrogen cycling developed at the scale of individual grassland plots can be extended to predict nitrate behaviour in catchments with pasture land use. B. Webb uses data from the Exe basin monitoring network to examine the impact over a 17-year period of river regulation on the downstream thermal regime and hydroecology. The second section (Sediment Dynamics and Yields) highlights the complexity of the suspended sediment concentration-discharge relationship. K. Banasik discusses a conceptual model of the instantaneous unit sedimentgraph, (combing the instantaneous unit hydrograph with a dimensionless sediment concentration distribution). R. Curr provides a longer term perspective for a small catchment in the UK by correlating the pattern of particle size variations in sediments trapped in a lake. Finally, C. Clark shows how storm-period sediment concentrations and loads are related to a range of factors in a multivariate manner, based on studies of small catchments in east Devon. The next section (Sediment Quality) illustrates the approaches to studies of sediment quality with three contributions. The impact of mining activity on fluvial sediments is studied by J. Merefield (information on sediment mineralogy to trace the movement of sediment derived from mining activity) and by S. Bradley who focuses on sediment-associated metal content to investigate processes of sediment redistribution in a number of British catchments. The sediment properties of C and N contents are studied by M. Peart: C-N ratios and loss on ignition may be used to identify sediment sources in a Hong Kong catchment. The fourth section (Sediment Sources and Sinks) gives some tools for the identification of catchment sediment sources and quantifying their contribution to the suspended sediment carried in river systems (R. J. Loughran and B. L. Campbell,

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