In river science, as in all sciences, there is an accepted way of analyzing problems. This standardized way of collecting and analyzing data allows a cleaner comparison of results between sites or time periods, or an evaluation of the effectiveness of different management activities. Often this involves a preconceived reference frame for types of problems. What is gained in the efficient production of knowledge, however, is potentially lost for the potential of novel observations.
In the case of sediment transport, during the last century, river scientists have shown much less concern for sediment storage than for sediment movement, even though any given sediment particle is likely to spend centuries to millennia in storage on a floodplain or in bars [submerged banks of sediment] and only days to weeks in actual transport. Meade suggests that were geomorphologists to have focused on individual sediment particles’ movements beyond just the reach [a short, straight segment of a river] scale, emphasis from the research community would have inevitably focused on sediment storage, and thus on the processes that sediment undergoes during storage rather than on the processes of mobilizing sediment. Fluvial geomorphology would probably then have been dominated by studies of chemical weathering rather than fluid mechanics. The preference for Eulerian-based studies of sediment fluxes and the processes that determine those fluxes have arguably biased the research agenda of geomorphologists for several decades.