Spatio-temporal patterns of landslides and erosion in tropical andean catchments

Vanacker, Veerle [UCL] Guns, Marie [UCL] Clapuyt, François [UCL] Balthazar, Vincent [UCL] Tenorio, Gustavo Molina, Armando et al.

Tropical mountain regions are prone to high erosion rates, due to the occurrence of heavy rainfall events and intensely weathered steep terrain. Landslides are a recurrent phenomenon, and often considered as the dominant erosion process on the hillslopes and the main source of sediment. Quantifying the contribution of landslide-derived sediment to the overall sediment load remains a challenge. In this study, we derived catchment-average erosion rates from sediment gauging data and cosmogenic radionuclides (CRN), and examined their reliability and validity for constraining sediment yields in tectonically active regions. Then, we analysed the relationship between catchment-average erosion rates and landslide-derived sediment fluxes. The Pangor catchment, located in the western Andean mountain front, was selected for this study given its exceptionally long time series of hydrometeorological data (1974-2009). When including magnitude-frequency analyses of the sediment yields at the measurement site, the corrected gauging-based sediment yields remain one order of magnitude lower than the CRN-derived erosion rates. The underestimation of catchment-average erosion rates from gauging data points to the difficulty of extrapolating flow frequency and sediment rating data in non-stationary hydrological regimes, and severe undersampling of extreme events. In such conditions, erosion rates derived from cosmogenic radionuclides are a reliable alternative method for the quantification of catchment-average sediment yield. Landslide inventories from remote sensing data (1963-2010) and field measurements of landslide geometries are the input data for the derivation of landslide-derived sediment fluxes. The landslide-related erosion rates of 1688 (-326;+901) and 630 (-108;+300) t.km2.y-1 are similar to the CRN-derived erosion rates, likely suggesting that landslides are the main source of sediment in this mountainous catchment.