Sediment management in rivers basins has tended to deal with local issues associated with either excessive amounts of sediment (clean and contaminated) or sediment deficit. With sediment management increasingly needing to address both sediment quantity and sediment quality issues, it is becoming increasingly apparent that for sediment management to be effective the river basin represents the most appropriate scale for consideration. Although local and site-specific sediment issues are still likely to be the main scales at which interventions are made they need to be placed within a broader context and with full appreciation and consideration of their impacts within the river basin. This paper describes some of the reasons why the river basin scale represents the most appropriate scale for sediment management, while recognizing the needs for site-specific interventions. It also describes the development of conceptual river basin models (CRBM) for sediment.
