The editors of Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, the British Society for Geomorphology’s journal, selected the paper, "Finer grained sediment pulses decrease variability in entrainment thresholds of bed material." as the winner of this year’s Mike Kirkby Award. The editors looked across the papers published in 2025 (Volume 50) and selected this paper as the best in the volume. Below is the journal editor’s summary of the board’s reasoning:
Erikson, C.M., Renshaw, C.E. & Magilligan, F.J. (2025) Finer grained sediment pulses decrease variability in entrainment thresholds of bed material. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 50(11), e70149.
The paper by Christian Erikson and colleagues addresses a classic question; how the incursion of finer sediment into a stream bed modifies river bed shear stress partitioning and hence sediment transport. What is unique about this paper is its use of a three-year natural rather than a short-term scaled laboratory experiment to address this process. Natural experiments likely represent a fuller range of the drivers and degrees of freedom of channel response. The results show that laboratory-findings do not transfer simply to a field case, due to high rates of sediment supply causing burial and the effects of tributary-derived coarse sediment. The paper stands out for its methodological rigour and its sophistication in interpretation and so clearly merits the 2026 Michael J. Kirkby Award.