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Abstract
Natural sediment flocs are fragile, highly irregular, loosely bound aggregates comprising minerogenic and organic material. They contribute a major component of suspended sediment load and are critical for the fate and flux of sediment, carbon and pollutants in aquatic environments. Understanding their behaviour is essential to the sustainable management of waterways, fisheries and marine industries. For several decades, modelling approaches have utilised fractal mathematics and observations of two dimensional (2D) floc size distributions to infer levels of aggregation and predict their behaviour. Whilst this is a computationally simple solution, it is highly unlikely to reflect the complexity of natural sediment flocs and current models predicting fine sediment hydrodynamics are not efficient. Here, we show how new observations of fragile floc structures in three dimensions (3D) demonstrate unequivocally that natural flocs are non-fractal. We propose that floc hierarchy is based on observations of 3D structure and function rather than 2D size distribution. In contrast to fractal theory, our data indicate that flocs possess characteristics of emergent systems including non-linearity and scale-dependent feedbacks. These concepts and new data to quantify floc structures offer the opportunity to explore new emergence-based floc frameworks which better represent natural floc behaviour and could advance our predictive capacity.
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Details
1 Queen Mary University of London, School of Geography, London, UK (GRID:grid.4868.2) (ISNI:0000 0001 2171 1133)
2 Queen Mary University of London, School of Engineering & Materials Science, London, UK (GRID:grid.4868.2) (ISNI:0000 0001 2171 1133)
3 University of Cumbria, Institute of Science, Natural Resources and Outdoor Studies, Ambleside, UK (GRID:grid.266218.9) (ISNI:0000 0000 8761 3918)
4 Environment and Climate Change Canada, Burlington, Canada (GRID:grid.410334.1) (ISNI:0000 0001 2184 7612)
5 HR Wallingford, Wallingford, UK (GRID:grid.12826.3f) (ISNI:0000 0000 8789 350X)