Tracer Injection Experiments in RiveRs And Streams
An open, standardized database of river tracer experiments for understanding how solutes move through river corridors.
Why solute transport matters
River corridors, including their adjacent and underlying sediments, are ecosystems where waters from different sources mix. This mixing controls the fate of a multitude of dissolved solutes, such as nutrients essential to the ecosystem, dissolved minerals from natural weathering, pharmaceuticals from wastewater treatment plant discharge, and contaminants from nearby sources.
Practically useful computer models of how solutes are transported, including how they are exchanged back and forth between riverbed sediments and the river itself, are needed to understand water quality in rivers. Recent research suggests that these transport processes are missed by state-of-the-art computer models.
What TIERRAS brings together
TIERRAS compiles more than 400 tracer injection experiments in rivers and streams from around the globe, sourced from published studies, unpublished data and technical reports. The original data came in many formats and unit systems. Every experiment has been curated and standardized into one consistent structure, so experiments from different sources can finally be compared, combined and analyzed together.
Breakthrough curves
Concentration time series measured downstream of each injection: observed, conservative and discharge-adjusted concentrations, with the distance of every sampling location from the injection point.
Tracer & injection
Tracer type, injected mass, concentration, background concentration, injection duration, date and monitoring method.
Hydrology & water
Discharge, flow velocity and shear velocity, along with pH, dissolved solids, temperature and vegetation at the study reach.
Geomorphology & watershed
Stream slope, width, depth, cross-sectional area, bed material and thickness, Manning's n and drainage area.
Data can be filtered by river, tracer type, stream width, discharge and date, and downloaded in imperial or metric units.
What this work makes possible
Tracer experiments are expensive and time-consuming to run, and until now their results were scattered across decades of papers and reports. Bringing them together turns isolated field studies into a shared resource that supports research well beyond any single river.
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Data-driven and AI models of river transport
A database of this size makes it possible to train and test machine learning models that predict how solutes move from readily available site characteristics such as width, depth or discharge, without site-specific calibration.
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A common benchmark for the community
Researchers can test and compare transport models and parameter estimation methods against the same set of real field experiments, making results reproducible and comparable across studies.
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Better water quality decisions
Understanding how nutrients, pharmaceuticals and contaminants travel and are retained in rivers supports environmental managers, regulators and anyone responsible for protecting water resources.
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Patterns across rivers worldwide
With experiments from many rivers and streams in one place, researchers can extract general patterns in solute transport that cannot be seen from a single site.
Building adaptable models for rivers
This project seeks to develop a general approach to building adaptable computer models based on recently developed tools in mathematical modeling, including artificial intelligence, and to investigate how to specialize general models for particular rivers. We are generating a large database of experimental results from river transport studies from around the globe. The database will enable researchers to extract patterns associated with solute transport.
Be part of TIERRAS
Explore and download the data, share your own tracer experiments, or cite the dataset in your work.