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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Assessment Of The Effects Of Climate Change On Evapotranspiration With An Improved Elasticity Method In A Nonhumid Area, Lei Tian, Jiming Jin, Pute Wu, Guo-Yue Niu Dec 2018

Assessment Of The Effects Of Climate Change On Evapotranspiration With An Improved Elasticity Method In A Nonhumid Area, Lei Tian, Jiming Jin, Pute Wu, Guo-Yue Niu

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Climatic elasticity is a crucial metric to assess the hydrological influence of climate change. Based on the Budyko equation, this study performed an analytical derivation of the climatic elasticity of evapotranspiration (ET). With this derived elasticity, it is possible to quantitatively separate the impacts of precipitation, air temperature, net radiation, relative humidity, and wind speed on ET in a watershed. This method was applied in the Wuding River Watershed (WRW), located in the center of the Yellow River Watershed of China. The estimated rate of change in ET caused by climatic variables is −10.69 mm/decade, which is close to the …


Quantifying The Impact Of Climate Change And Human Activities On Streamflow In A Semi-Arid Watershed With The Budyko Equation Incorporating Dynamic Vegetation Information, Lei Tian, Jiming Jin, Pute Wu, Guo-Yue Niu Dec 2018

Quantifying The Impact Of Climate Change And Human Activities On Streamflow In A Semi-Arid Watershed With The Budyko Equation Incorporating Dynamic Vegetation Information, Lei Tian, Jiming Jin, Pute Wu, Guo-Yue Niu

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Understanding hydrological responses to climate change and land use and land cover change (LULCC) is important for water resource planning and management, especially for water-limited areas. The annual streamflow of the Wuding River Watershed (WRW), the largest sediment source of the Yellow River in China, has decreased significantly over the past 50 years at a rate of 5.2 mm/decade. Using the Budyko equation, this study investigated this decrease with the contributions from climate change and LULCC caused by human activities, which have intensified since 1999 due to China’s Grain for Green Project (GFGP). The Budyko parameter that represents watershed characteristics …


Can The Desiccation Of Great Salt Lake Be Stopped?, Wayne A. Wurtsbaugh, Craig Miller, Sarah E. Null, R. Justin Derose, Peter Wilcock Nov 2018

Can The Desiccation Of Great Salt Lake Be Stopped?, Wayne A. Wurtsbaugh, Craig Miller, Sarah E. Null, R. Justin Derose, Peter Wilcock

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake, with its watershed in the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains of Utah, Wyoming and Idaho. Like all terminal lakes, the water inflows are balanced only by evaporative loss from its surface—when inflows decrease the lake shrinks until evaporation matches that inflow.


Sediment Dynamics In The Bear River-Mud Lake-Bear Lake System, Patrick Belmont, Mitchell Donovan, Janice Brahney, Lindsay Capito, Zach Burgert Nov 2018

Sediment Dynamics In The Bear River-Mud Lake-Bear Lake System, Patrick Belmont, Mitchell Donovan, Janice Brahney, Lindsay Capito, Zach Burgert

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

The overarching goal of this project was to compile and analyze a variety of existing datasets, and generate several new datasets, to advance our understanding of how the Bear River Mud Lake-Bear Lake system functions, how it has, or is expected to change, identify which components are degraded or vulnerable to degradation, and determine if/where critical data and/or knowledge gaps exist. We conducted a series of analyses to evaluate changes in hydrology and suspended sediment, collected sediment cores from nine locations in Mud Lake to evaluate how sedimentation rates, sediment sources and water quality have changed over time, and utilized …


Sustaining Wetlands To Mitigate Disasters And Protect People, Joanna Endter-Wada, Karin M. Kettenring, Ariana E. Sutton-Grier Oct 2018

Sustaining Wetlands To Mitigate Disasters And Protect People, Joanna Endter-Wada, Karin M. Kettenring, Ariana E. Sutton-Grier

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Hurricanes, flooding, droughts. Weather‐related disasters are dominating news cycles and causing widespread destruction, most recently with Typhoon Mangkhut and Hurricane Florence. The US had the most catastrophic hurricane season on record in 2017, with hundreds of billions of dollars in estimated damages. California is experiencing unprecedented tragedies from widespread wildfires and increased vulnerability to storms. Disasters that were once uncommon appear to be the new norm globally, and evidence suggests the frequency and impacts of extreme events will increase further with climate change.


Long-Term Evolution Of Sand Transport Through A River Network: Relative Influences Of A Dam Versus Natural Changes In Grain Size From Sand Waves, David J. Topping, Erich R. Mueller, John C. Schmidt, Ronald E. Griffiths, David J. Dean, Paul E. Grams Aug 2018

Long-Term Evolution Of Sand Transport Through A River Network: Relative Influences Of A Dam Versus Natural Changes In Grain Size From Sand Waves, David J. Topping, Erich R. Mueller, John C. Schmidt, Ronald E. Griffiths, David J. Dean, Paul E. Grams

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Temporal and spatial nonuniformity in supplies of water and sand in a river network leads to sand transport that is in local disequilibrium with the upstream sand supply. In such river networks, sand is transported downstream as elongating waves in which coupled changes in grain size and transport occur. Depending on the magnitude of each sand-supplying event and the interval between such events, changes in bed-sand grain size associated with sand-wave passage may more strongly regulate sand transport than do changes in water discharge. When sand transport is controlled more by episodic resupply of sand than by discharge, upstream dam …


Reducing High Flows And Sediment Loading Through Increased Water Storage In An Agricultural Watershed Of The Upper Midwest, Usa, Nate Mitchell, Karthik Kumarasamy, Se Jong Cho, Patrick Belmont, Brent Dalzell, Karen Gran Aug 2018

Reducing High Flows And Sediment Loading Through Increased Water Storage In An Agricultural Watershed Of The Upper Midwest, Usa, Nate Mitchell, Karthik Kumarasamy, Se Jong Cho, Patrick Belmont, Brent Dalzell, Karen Gran

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Climate change, land clearing, and artificial drainage have increased the Minnesota River Basin’s (MRB) stream flows, enhancing erosion of channel banks and bluffs. Accelerated erosion has increased sediment loads and sedimentation rates downstream. High flows could be reduced through increased water storage (e.g., wetlands or detention basins), but quantifying the effectiveness of such a strategy remains a challenge. We used the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to simulate changes in river discharge from various water retention site (WRS) implementation scenarios in the Le Sueur watershed, a tributary basin to the MRB. We also show how high flow attenuation can …


Natural And Managed Watersheds Show Similar Responses To Recent Climate Change, Darren L. Ficklin, John T. Abatzoglou, Scott M. Robeson, Sarah E. Null, Jason H. Knouft Aug 2018

Natural And Managed Watersheds Show Similar Responses To Recent Climate Change, Darren L. Ficklin, John T. Abatzoglou, Scott M. Robeson, Sarah E. Null, Jason H. Knouft

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Changes in climate are driving an intensification of the hydrologic cycle and leading to alterations of natural streamflow regimes. Human disturbances such as dams, land-cover change, and water diversions are thought to obscure climate signals in hydrologic systems. As a result, most studies of changing hydroclimatic conditions are limited to areas with natural streamflow. Here, we compare trends in observed streamflow from natural and human-modified watersheds in the United States and Canada for the 1981–2015 water years to evaluate whether comparable responses to climate change are present in both systems. We find that patterns and magnitudes of trends in median …


Calibration Parameter Selection And Watershed Hydrology Model Evaluation In Time And Frequency Domains, Karthik Kumarasamy, Patrick Belmont May 2018

Calibration Parameter Selection And Watershed Hydrology Model Evaluation In Time And Frequency Domains, Karthik Kumarasamy, Patrick Belmont

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Watershed scale models simulating hydrological and water quality processes have advanced rapidly in sophistication, process representation, flexibility in model structure, and input data. With calibration being an inevitable step prior to any model application, there is need for a simple procedure to assess whether or not a parameter should be adjusted for calibration. We provide a rationale for a hierarchical selection of parameters to adjust during calibration and recommend that modelers progress from parameters that are most uncertain to parameters that are least uncertain, namely starting with pure calibration parameters, followed by derived parameters, and finally measured parameters. We show …


The Relationship Between Measures Of Annual Livestock Disturbance In Western Riparian Areas And Stream Conditions Important To Trout, Salmon, And Char, Lindsey M. Goss, Brett B. Roper Apr 2018

The Relationship Between Measures Of Annual Livestock Disturbance In Western Riparian Areas And Stream Conditions Important To Trout, Salmon, And Char, Lindsey M. Goss, Brett B. Roper

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Managing livestock disturbance in riparian zones in a manner that provides economic returns to ranchers while protecting streams is an important aspect of rangeland management on public lands in the western United States. Attempts to balance economic and ecologic outcomes have been made more difficult due to the presence of several salmonid species that are protected under the Endangered Species Act. One approach to proper management of livestock use near streams has been to define the allowable limits of disturbance using 2 metrics, streambank alteration and stubble height. We evaluated 153 stream reaches within the Interior Columbia Basin to determine …


High Resolution Monitoring Of River Bluff Erosion Reveals Failure Mechanisms And Geomorphically Effective Flows, Sara A. Kelly, Patrick Belmont Mar 2018

High Resolution Monitoring Of River Bluff Erosion Reveals Failure Mechanisms And Geomorphically Effective Flows, Sara A. Kelly, Patrick Belmont

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Using a combination of Structure from Motion and time lapse photogrammetry, we document rapid river bluff erosion occurring in the Greater Blue Earth River (GBER) basin, a muddy tributary to the sediment-impaired Minnesota River in south central Minnesota. Our datasets elucidated dominant bluff failure mechanisms and rates of bluff retreat in a transient system responding to ongoing streamflow increases and glacial legacy impacts. Specifically, we document the importance of fluvial scour, freeze–thaw, as well as other drivers of bluff erosion. We find that even small flows, a mere 30% of the two-year recurrence interval flow, are capable of causing bluff …


Alluvial Substrate Mapping By Automated Texture Segmentation Of Recreational-Grade Side Scan Sonar Imagery, Daniel Hamill, Daniel Buscombe, Joseph Michael Wheaton Mar 2018

Alluvial Substrate Mapping By Automated Texture Segmentation Of Recreational-Grade Side Scan Sonar Imagery, Daniel Hamill, Daniel Buscombe, Joseph Michael Wheaton

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Side scan sonar in low-cost ‘fishfinder’ systems has become popular in aquatic ecology and sedimentology for imaging submerged riverbed sediment at coverages and resolutions sufficient to relate bed texture to grain-size. Traditional methods to map bed texture (i.e. physical samples) are relatively high-cost and low spatial coverage compared to sonar, which can continuously image several kilometers of channel in a few hours. Towards a goal of automating the classification of bed habitat features, we investigate relationships between substrates and statistical descriptors of bed textures in side scan sonar echograms of alluvial deposits. We develop a method for automated segmentation of …


Benthic Meiofaunal Community Response To The Cascading Effects Of Herbivory Within An Algal Halo System Of The Great Barrier Reef, Quinn R. Ollivier, Edward Hammill, David J. Booth, Elizabeth M.P. Madin, Charles Hinchliffe, Alastair R. Harborne, Catherine E. Lovelock, Peter I. Macreadie, Trisha Brooke Atwood Mar 2018

Benthic Meiofaunal Community Response To The Cascading Effects Of Herbivory Within An Algal Halo System Of The Great Barrier Reef, Quinn R. Ollivier, Edward Hammill, David J. Booth, Elizabeth M.P. Madin, Charles Hinchliffe, Alastair R. Harborne, Catherine E. Lovelock, Peter I. Macreadie, Trisha Brooke Atwood

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Benthic fauna play a crucial role in organic matter decomposition and nutrient cycling at the sediment-water boundary in aquatic ecosystems. In terrestrial systems, grazing herbivores have been shown to influence below-ground communities through alterations to plant distribution and composition, however whether similar cascading effects occur in aquatic systems is unknown. Here, we assess the relationship between benthic invertebrates and above-ground fish grazing across the ‘grazing halos’ of Heron Island lagoon, Australia. Grazing halos, which occur around patch reefs globally, are caused by removal of seagrass or benthic macroalgae by herbivorous fish that results in distinct bands of unvegetated sediments surrounding …


A Network Model For Primary Production Highlights Linkages Between Salmonid Populations And Autochthonous Resources, W. Carl Saunders, Nicolaas Bouwes, Peter Mchugh, Chris E. Jordan Mar 2018

A Network Model For Primary Production Highlights Linkages Between Salmonid Populations And Autochthonous Resources, W. Carl Saunders, Nicolaas Bouwes, Peter Mchugh, Chris E. Jordan

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Spatial variation in fish densities across river networks suggests that the influence of food and habitat resources on assemblages varies greatly throughout watersheds. Conceptual models predict that in situ primary production should vary with river characteristics, but the influence of autochthonous resource availability on the capacity for river reaches to support fish is poorly understood. We estimated primary production throughout the South Fork and Middle Fork of the John Day River, Oregon, by measuring diel cycles in dissolved oxygen (DO) during July 2013. Using these data, we (1) evaluated the extent to which juvenile salmonid abundance and resource limitation correlated …