Introduction

Much of the scientific interest in rivers revolves around attempting to quantify the flux and fate of fluvial discharge and to understand the processes that dictate these fluxes. No matter the motivation, a comprehensive understanding of fluvial processes and fluxes requires a synthetic approach, one that covers a wide range of spatial and temporal scales – local to global, hours to millennia – over which these processes occur and vary. In this chapter we discuss fluvial runoff and erosion and the transfer of their products to the coastal zone. We attempt to delineate the environmental factors that control these fluxes by utilizing both published literature and the database that we have collated in the book's appendix and GIS-based materials on the accompanying website, www.cambridge.org/milliman. This exercise, however, must be viewed within the context of numerous previous efforts that collectively have laid the foundation for much of what is said here. To mention just a few previous studies that have dealt with suspended and dissolved solid transfer: Fournier (1949), Livingstone (1963), Holeman (1968), Lisitzin (1972), Baumgartner and Reichel (1975), Meybeck (1979, 1988, 1994), Milliman and Meade (1983), Walling and Webb (1983, 1996), Berner and Berner (1987), Meade et al. (1990), Milliman and Syvitski (1992), Summerfield and Hulton (1994), Stallard (1995a, b), Meade (1996), Edmond and Huh (1997), Ludwig and Probst (1998), Syvitski and Milliman (2007), and de Vente et al. (2007).