About Journal of Sediment Research

Journal of Sediment Research

Overview and identity

Journal of Sediment Research is a Chinese-language journal devoted to sediment science, published in Beijing. Its Chinese title is Nisha Yanjiu — literally, the study of mud and sand — and its International Standard Serial Number is ISSN 0468-155X. Founded in 1956, it is China's specialist journal for the science of sediment: how sediment is produced by erosion, transported by water, and deposited in rivers, reservoirs, estuaries and coasts. It is published in association with the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research and the sediment community of the Chinese Hydraulic Engineering Society, and it is a Chinese core journal. Bibliographic records in international repositories confirm the identity exactly as stated: articles are catalogued under "Nisha Yanjiu / Journal of Sediment Research" with ISSN 0468-155X, in references ranging from British soil-erosion modelling to Chinese reservoir studies.

No country needs such a journal more than China. Chinese rivers, above all the Yellow River, have historically carried some of the largest sediment loads on Earth, and managing that sediment — keeping it out of reservoirs, channels and harbours, or putting eroded soil back under vegetation — is one of the permanent engineering problems of the Chinese state. A journal founded in 1956 to make sediment a subject of continuous specialist study, rather than an incidental topic inside general hydraulics, is the periodical expression of that national problem.

Founding in 1956 and a long, interrupted century

The journal was founded in 1956, in the first decade of the People's Republic, when the new state's water programme — flood control on the Yellow and Huai rivers, the first great reservoirs, and soil conservation on the Loess Plateau — was generating sediment questions faster than general journals could absorb them. Sediment specialists needed a place to publish the mechanics of sediment transport, the measurement of erosion and the behaviour of sediment-laden flows, and Nisha Yanjiu was created for that purpose. It is among the oldest specialist periodicals in Chinese water science.

Its modern volumes show a journal still at work in the twenty-first century. International reference lists cite it continuously: a study of processes of water and sediment and deposition in the cascade reservoirs of the lower Jinsha River in its volume 44 in 2019; work on the transport characteristics of suspended sediment in the Jinsha River over fifty years in volume 45 in 2020; studies of the minimum water requirement for sediment transport in the lower Yellow River in its 2002 and 2003 volumes; and Fei Xiangjun's study of the long-distance transport mechanism of hyperconcentrated flows in 1998. The journal's subject matter in those citations — cascade reservoirs, great sediment-carrying rivers, the water needed to move sediment to the sea — is the classical agenda of Chinese sediment science, pursued in its pages across seven decades.

The Beijing base and the national water research institute

The journal is associated with the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR) in Beijing, the largest comprehensive national research institute in its field in China. IWHR was established in 1958, with a history traced to China's first hydraulic laboratory, founded in Tianjin in 1933, and it works across water resources management, flood control, river regulation and — centrally for this journal — sedimentation in rivers and reservoirs. The institute hosts the secretariats of the World Association for Sedimentation and Erosion Research and of the UNESCO International Research and Training Center on Erosion and Sedimentation, both headquartered in Beijing because of the depth of Chinese sediment work.

IWHR's experimental capacity shows why Beijing is a sediment capital. Its sediment experiment hall, built in 1999–2003, is a 400-metre facility with clear-water reservoirs, turbid-water mixing and sanding systems and automatic measurement for large-scale physical models; it has run experimental studies on sediment simulation and control for the Three Gorges Reservoir and its downstream channels, on cascade hydropower stations on the Jinsha River, on sedimentation in Yellow River reservoirs and the regulation of its downstream channel, and on the evolution of the Yangtze, Yellow and Pearl River estuaries. The institute also maintains a self-circulating flume for debris-flow and hyperconcentrated-flow experiments at sediment concentrations up to 600 kilograms per cubic metre. Research of exactly this kind — model experiments, reservoir sedimentation, estuary evolution — is the raw material of the Journal of Sediment Research.

Scope: transport, reservoirs, erosion and coasts

The journal's scope, as its name and its published record define it, covers river sediment transport; reservoir sedimentation; soil erosion; estuary and coastal sediment; and hyperconcentrated flows. Sediment transport research addresses how water moves sand and silt — the mechanics that decide whether a channel scours or silts. Reservoir sedimentation research addresses the fate of China's great dams, whose storage is consumed by deposited sediment unless it is managed: the journal's 2019 analysis of reservoir siltation in China, and its review of sedimentation control and storage capacity recovery, are examples of that national stocktaking appearing in its pages.

Soil erosion research connects the journal to the land: the Loess Plateau, source of nearly ninety percent of the Yellow River's sediment, where erosion models — including the coarse-scale PESERA model published in English in this journal in a paper catalogued by the University of Leeds repository — and conservation practice determine how much sediment the rivers receive. Estuary and coastal sediment research follows the load to the sea, where deltas grow or, as sediment supply falls, erode. Hyperconcentrated flow research — the study of flows so laden with sediment that they behave as a two-phase fluid, with concentrations above 300 to 400 kilograms per cubic metre widely observed in the middle Yellow River basin — is a field Chinese scientists effectively created, and this journal is one of its original homes.

The Yellow River, the journal's central subject

Running through the journal's history is the Yellow River. Before the 1980s the river carried an average of about 1.6 billion tonnes of sediment a year, the highest rate of any large river in the world, raised from the thick, loose, easily eroded loess of the plateau through which it flows. That load built the North China Plain, perched the lower river above its floodplain behind levees, silted reservoirs and channels, and made sediment the central variable of Yellow River management. The Journal of Sediment Research has published the science of that system for as long as the modern management of the river has existed, including the long-running question of how much water the lower river needs simply to carry its sediment to the sea.

The same literature records the transformation now under way. A major study of nine major Chinese rivers found that their combined sediment load fell by about eighty-five percent between the periods 1954–1968 and 2004–2015 — from 1.95 billion tonnes a year to about 310 million tonnes — with roughly fifty-three billion tonnes of sediment retained on land by human activity, through reservoir trapping, water use and soil conservation. In the Yellow River itself, conservation works on the Loess Plateau expanded from under 50,000 square kilometres in the 1970s to over 300,000 after 2010, and the Grain for Green programme after 1999 accelerated vegetation recovery. A sediment journal founded when the problem was too much sediment now also publishes the science of too little: starving deltas, scouring channels and reservoirs whose trapped loads must be released or recovered.

Distinction from the International Journal of Sediment Research

The journal must be distinguished from its younger English-language relative. The International Journal of Sediment Research, ISSN 1001-6279, was founded in 1986, is co-owned by the International Research and Training Center on Erosion and Sedimentation, IWHR and Tsinghua University, is the official journal of the World Association for Sedimentation and Erosion Research, and is indexed in the Science Citation Index. It publishes in English for an international readership. The Journal of Sediment Research — Nisha Yanjiu, ISSN 0468-155X, founded 1956 — is the older, Chinese-language national journal of the same Beijing sediment establishment. The two titles share a city, a research community and a subject, but they are separate journals with separate ISSNs, languages and histories, and citations to "J. Sediment Res." with Chinese-language papers and Beijing volume numbering refer to the journal described here.

Readership and role

The journal's readers are China's sediment workforce: researchers in water institutes and universities, engineers designing and operating reservoirs and river-training works, soil and water conservation professionals on the Loess Plateau and other eroding lands, and estuary and harbour engineers on the coast. Its core-journal standing marks it as a recognised national title, and its papers are cited in the international sediment literature — in studies of reservoir longevity, Yellow River sediment-transport efficiency, cascade reservoir deposition and soil erosion modelling — whenever the Chinese record on a sediment problem is needed. Because so much of the world's practical sediment experience of the past seventy years is Chinese, that record has a significance well beyond its language.

Standing and outlook

Founded in 1956 and still publishing the sediment science of the Jinsha, Yangtze and Yellow rivers in the 2020s, the Journal of Sediment Research is one of the durable specialist institutions of Chinese water science. Its subject has not diminished; it has changed sign. Reservoirs fill and must be managed, deltas starve and must be understood, eroding plateaus recover and must be measured, and the great experiment of reducing the sediment loads of nine major rivers by eighty-five percent must be documented by exactly the community this journal serves. Nisha Yanjiu — the study of mud and sand, ISSN 0468-155X, from Beijing — remains the Chinese-language journal of record for that work, as it has been since the first years of the People's Republic's water programme.