Abstract: This paper reviews the new development of fingerprinting method in sediment research. Recent studies have focused on the improvement of the models and the uncertainty analysis of the results. In particular, many methods have been proposed to calculate the relative contributions of sediment sources and to improve the accuracy of the results. At present, there are four new models of fingerprinting method: Modified Hughes, Landwehr, Distribution and Multi-Discriminant Function. The new methods of reducing the uncertainty of results are to improve the accuracy of the results by increasing the number of samples through statistical analysis or by using a combination of multiple fingerprinting properties. This paper discusses the factors that affect the uncertainty of the results:sediment source areas, sampling methods, and fingerprint-ing properties. At last, an application example is given to compare the new models.

Keywords：fingerprinting method；sediment sources；fingerprinting properties；uncertainty analysis

(Journal of China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Vol. 16, No. 5, 2018)