An official website of the United States government
Abstract Watershed resilience is the ability of a watershed to maintain its characteristic system state while concurrently resisting, adapting to, and reorganizing after hydrological (for example, drought, flooding) or biogeochemical (for example, excessive nutrient) disturbances. Vulnerable waters include non-floodplain wetlands and headwater streams, abundant watershed components representing the most distal extent of the freshwater aquatic network. Vulnerable waters are hydrologically dynamic and biogeochemically reactive aquatic systems, storing, processing, and releasing water and entrained (that is, dissolved and particulate) materials along expanding and contracting aquatic networks. The hydrological and biogeochemical functions emerging from these processes affect the magnitude, frequency, timing, duration, storage, and rate of change of material and energy fluxes among watershed components and to downstream waters, thereby maintaining watershed states and imparting watershed resilience. We present here a conceptual framework for understanding how vulnerable waters confer watershed resilience. We demonstrate how individual and cumulative vulnerable-water modifications (for example, reduced extent, altered connectivity) affect watershed-scale hydrological and biogeochemical disturbance response and recovery, which decreases watershed resilience and can trigger transitions across thresholds to alternative watershed states (for example, states conducive to increased flood frequency or nutrient concentrations). We subsequently describe how resilient watersheds require spatial heterogeneity and temporal variability in hydrological and biogeochemical interactions between terrestrial systems and down-gradient waters, which necessitates attention to the conservation and restoration of vulnerable waters and their downstream connectivity gradients. To conclude, we provide actionable principles for resilient watersheds and articulate research needs to further watershed resilience science and vulnerable-water management.
more »
« less
Baltimore Ecosystem Study: Estimates of population in focal watersheds based on 2010 census
This dataset includes population estimates for eight focal sub-watersheds in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study based on the proportion of 2010 census blocks located within the watershed. These data can facilitate per capita calculations of watershed fluxes.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1855277
- PAR ID:
- 10474634
- Publisher / Repository:
- Environmental Data Initiative
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Bruckman, Viktor J (Ed.)The Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (HBES) in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, USA, was started in June 1963 by Gene E. Likens, F. Herbert Bormann, Noye M. Johnson, and Robert S. Pierce. Comprehensive, watershed-ecosystem mass balances of water and chemical elements have been done continuously until the present time. These long-term, integrated and continuous records of precipitation and streamwater amounts and their chemical composition from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (HBEF) may be the longest in the world (Likens 2013, Holmes and Likens 2016). Long-term watershed and plot-scale studies of biotic, chemical, hydrologic, physical, and geologic conditions and their interactions have contributed to the overall ecological understanding of this complex ecosystem (see review in Holmes and Likens 2016). Watershed-scale experimentation (e.g. deforestation, Watershed 2; forest strip cutting, Watershed 4; wholetree harvest, Watershed 5; base cation replenishment, Watershed 1) have revealed ecosystem processes at the landscape scale.more » « less
-
This paper introduces new algorithms for conducting and improving watershed analysis, implemented with the particular goal of improving the ability to measure the shapes of mineral grains to be subsequently be analyzed by mass spectrometry. This application requires a high degree of accuracy and fidelity in terms of both separating all touching grains and preserving their shapes. The algorithms are designed to take advantage of a vector-based programming environment. A new implementation of the Euclidean distance transform utilizes the fact that the distance from any adjacent pair of voxels to the nearest boundary must be within one voxel of each other. In practice, however, this algorithm is outperformed by a smoothed approximate distance transform that is faster to compute and results in less irregular watershed boundaries. A one-pass rainfall-based watershed algorithm is introduced that runs in linear time with the number of segmented voxels, and requires no priority queue. Unlike marker-based watershed algorithms based on the basin-filling approach, the rainfall approach finds watersheds associated with all local maxima in the distance map, even if a marking algorithm is used. A post-watershed smoothing algorithm improves watershed boundaries and eliminates small spurious watersheds. The one-pass watershed and post-watershed smoothing algorithms run in times superior or comparable to basin-fill watershed algorithms implemented in other environments, and offers excellent ability to separate touching objects efficiently while placing watershed boundaries that maximize the preservation of details of particle shape. Further time improvement could come from implementing them in a vector-based environment that allows explicit multi-threading.more » « less
-
Fine litterfall (leaves, twigs, fruits, seeds, etc.) is collected in Watershed 1, Watershed 5, the Throughfall plots and the Bear Brook Watershed reference forest, located to the west of Watershed 6, to quantify carbon and nutrient flux associated with this important pathway. These measurements have facilitated quantification of ice storm effects and species declines (paper birch, sugar maple). These data were gathered as part of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (HBES). The HBES is a collaborative effort at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, which is operated and maintained by the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station.more » « less
-
Fine litterfall (leaves, twigs, fruits, seeds, etc.) is collected in Watershed 1, Watershed 5, the Throughfall plots and the Bear Brook Watershed reference forest, located to the west of Watershed 6, to quantify carbon and nutrient flux associated with this important pathway. These measurements have facilitated quantification of ice storm effects and species declines (paper birch, sugar maple). These data were gathered as part of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (HBES). The HBES is a collaborative effort at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, which is operated and maintained by the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station.more » « less
