JWSS - Journal of Water and Soil Science

Obtaining information about relative importance of sediment sources and their contributions on sediment production and thus identification of on-site critical areas is required for implementing soil and water conservations and sediment control programs. For this reason, in this study 35 geochemical tracers and organic carbon were measured in 45 samples of sediment sources and in 11 watershed sediment samples to determine the sediment deposit contribution of each land use as sediment resources in Kond watershed of Tehran province. Based on the results of Kruskal-Wallis test, from among 35 measured traces, 10 tracers including Al, As, Be, Ca, Mo, P, Pb, S, Zn and OC had ability to discriminate sediment sources with less than 1% confidence level. Then, 5 tracers: OC, S, P, Zn and As were selected as optimum composite using Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA) with 0.000 confidence coefficient that had distinguishing capability of sediment sources by 97.8% correct assignation. Finally, the results of multivariate mixing model showed that contribution means of orchard, range and residential were 1.54, 14.27 and 84.18% in sediment production, respectively. Also, the sum of squares of the error was 0.33. The results of this study can be used in selecting an appropriate method for sediment control in studied area.