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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.

Over the past 30 plus years, the Arctic has warmed at a rate of 0.6°C per decade. This has resulted in considerable permafrost thaw and alterations of hydrological and biogeochemical processes. Coincident with these changes, recent studies document increases in annual fluxes of inorganic nutrients in larger Arctic rivers. Changing nutrient fluxes in Arctic rivers have been largely attributed to warming‐induced active layer expansion and newly exposed subsurface source areas. However, the ability of Arctic headwater streams to modulate inorganic nutrient patterns manifested in larger rivers remains unresolved. We evaluated environmental conditions, stream ecosystem metabolism, and nutrient uptake in three headwater streams of the Alaskan Arctic to quantify patterns of retention of inorganic nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P). We observed elevated ambient nitrate‐N (NO₃‐N) concentrations in late summer/early fall in two of three experimental stream reaches. We observed detectable increases in uptake as a result of nutrient addition in 88% of PO₄‐P additions (n = 25), 38% of NH₄‐N additions (n = 24), and 24% of NO₃‐N additions (n = 25). We observed statistically significant relationships between NH₄‐N uptake and ecosystem respiration, and PO₄‐P uptake and gross primary productivity. Although these headwater streams demonstrate ability to control downstream transport of PO₄‐P, we observed little evidence the same holds for dissolved inorganic N. Consequently, our results suggest that continued increases in terrestrial to aquatic N transfer in Arctic headwater landscapes are likely to be evident in larger Arctic rivers, in‐network lakes, and coastal environments.

The discipline of hydrology has long focused on quantifying the water balance, which is frequently used to estimate unknown water fluxes or stores. While technologies for measuring water balance components continue to improve, all components of the balance have substantial uncertainty at the watershed scale. Watershed‐scale evapotranspiration, storage, and groundwater import or export are particularly difficult to measure. Given these uncertainties, analyses based on assumed water balance closure are highly sensitive to uncertainty propagation and errors of omission, where unknown components are assumed negligible. This commentary examines how greater insight may be gained in some cases by keeping the water balance open rather than applying methods that impose water balance closure. An open water balance can facilitate identifying where unknowns such as groundwater import/export are affecting watershed‐scale streamflow. Strategic improvements in monitoring networks can help reduce uncertainties in observable variables and improve our ability to quantify unknown parts of the water balance. Improvements may include greater spatial overlap between measurements of water balance components through coordination between entities responsible for monitoring precipitation, snow, evapotranspiration, groundwater, and streamflow. Measuring quasi‐replicate watersheds can help characterize the range of variability in the water balance, and nested measurements within watersheds can reveal areas of net groundwater import or export. Well‐planned monitoring networks can facilitate progress on critical hydrologic questions about how much water becomes evapotranspiration, how groundwater interacts with surface watersheds at varying spatial and temporal scales, how much humans have altered the water cycle, and how streamflow will respond to future climate change.