Impacts of post-Soviet land-use transformation on sediment dynamics in the Western Caucasus

This repository contains the main processing steps to explore sediment load temporal changes in the Kuban River basin (Western Caucasus) during the 1975-2020 period. It is meant to accompany a journal article (Tsyplenkov et al., 2025).

For a deep introduction to the study, please refer to:

Tsyplenkov A, Grachev A, Yermolaev O, Golosov V. Impacts of post-Soviet land-use transformation on sediment dynamics in the Western Caucasus. Journal of Hydrology, 132965, 2025. doi: 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2025.132965

Highlights

• This study investigates sediment transport dynamics over the last five decades in the western Greater Caucasus, focusing on the Krasnodar Reservoir, using repeated bathymetric surveys and gauging station measurements.
• The results indicate a progressive increase in erosion rates from 1975 to the period of 1993–2005, followed by a subsequent decline that persists to the present day.
• The collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent land-use changes, especially in arable and pastoral lands, were identified as primary drivers of sediment transport alteration, with significant shifts observed between 1995 and 2000.
• The Top-Kriging modelling technique was effectively used to extend suspended sediment yield (SSY) records and predict SSY in ungauged basins, demonstrating good accuracy (NSE = 0.63) in cross-validation and comparison with independent reservoir sedimentation records.

Documentation

The repository is organized as follows:

├── analysis
├── data
├── figures
├── R
├── tables
└── workflow

where

• analysis: Where all the juicy results live, mosty for internal use
• data: Home to our raw data. However, some data is too big to be uploaded and can be shared upon request
• figures: You guessed it - all the visualizations
• tables: Where we keep our data tables nice and tidy
• R: The R scripts that make everything work internally
• workflow: Step-by-step instructions on how everything fits together

Some maps, as well as manual shoreline digitizing, were performed in QGIS 3.34 LTS version. The corresponding .qgz project files are uploaded. The QGIS projects are missing some heavy satellite imagery, as well as DEM. Files can be shared upon request.

How to reproduce?

This project can be reproduced either directly on your machine or using Docker/Podman containers. We used the {renv} package to create a stable version-specific library of R packages. The work itself was done on Ubuntu 22.04 in R 4.4.1.

Option 1: Direct installation

1. Make sure that R 4.4.1 and {renv} packages are installed
2. Clone the repository and navigate to its directory
3. Run renv::restore() to install all required packages
4. The folder workflow contains all necessary steps to reproduce the results. Follow inner folders in order they are named to produce the results. Folder R contains additional functions that were written to support the analysis.

Option 2: Using Docker/Podman

1. Clone the current repository:

git clone https://github.com/atsyplenkov/nth-west-caucasus-sediments.git

2. Navigate to the downloaded directory:

cd nth-west-caucasus-sediments

3. Build the container image:

podman build -t nth-west-caucasus-sediments-image -f Dockerfile

The Dockerfile is configured to install all the required packages and restore the renv environment.

4. Create and run a container with the mounted local directory:

podman run -d --name nth-west-caucasus-sediments \
  --mount "type=bind,src=$(pwd),target=/nth-west-caucasus-sediments" \
  -p 8080:80 nth-west-caucasus-sediments-image

This command mounts your current working directory (the cloned repository) to the /nth-west-caucasus-sediments directory inside the container, allowing you to access and modify files from both the host and container.

5. Open the container:

podman exec -it nth-west-caucasus-sediments R

Related reproducible research by our team

• Study describing suspended sediment spatial patterns in the Greater Caucasus mountains (Golosov & Tsyplenkov, 2021)
• Spatio-temporal assessment of suspended sediment changes during the Anthropocene in the adjacent Terek River basin (Tsyplenkov et al., 2021)