Specific objectives & Research questions

• to summarize our current state of knowledge regarding fluxes and forms of elements; to continue collaborations between researchers who study physical processes of sediment movement, chemical discharges, and hydrological processes; to better produce/refine models of physical and chemical processes for flux analysis within the catchment.
• Basin-wide perspective on advanced water budget, to produce advanced water budgets and predictive models of water quality, with emphasis on establishing uniform protocols of data collection methodologies, and establishing protocols for sharing among research groups.
• Implications of changes in the landscape for influencing basin runoff: water quantity and quality modeling and monitoring, with tributary system studies to further (precisely) refine sources of heavy metal inputs, and identify local catchment variations.
• “Big picture”; to constrain predictions at basin-scale, with emphasis that the system, in its current configuration, remains un-dammed, and that this is about to change. Emphasizing the need to better understand the Selenga system in terms of the functions of various processes, such as catchment-scale sediment erosion and transport models.
• Large-scale transport phenomena; can we track contaminants from sources in the upstream mining, using both geophysical processes and chemical fingerprinting? This dovetails nicely with a “source to sink” style study, specifically targeting grain size (washload versus bedload), and provides a basis for evaluating sediment residence time in a dispersal systems, which is a BIG topic in basin research.
• A catchment-wide flux analysis could be utilized to evaluate/predict water quality: what are the pollutants? What are the necessary “state of the art” treatment processes? Is it possible to utilize a particular tracer (e.g., arsenic) to evaluate fate of chemical transport variability in time and space (e.g., year-to-year and over basin scale); such a paper/study could be a prime example of bringing our work together.