The main objective of the study presented in this paper was to develop an evaluation scheme which is suitable for spatially explicit groundwater vulnerability assessment according to the Water Framework Directive (WFD). Study area was the Hase river catchment, an area of about 3 000 km2 in north-west Germany which is dominated by livestock farming, in particular pig and poultry production. For ...

1 Co-operative Research Centre for Catchment Hydrology and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Melbourne ([email protected], [email protected], [email protected]). 2 Co-operative Research Centre for Catchment Hydrology and the School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Melbourne (idruth@unimel...

Time series of chloride concentrations and oxygen-18 isotopic ratios are widely used for tracing catchment storage and mixing processes and for inferring catchment travel-time distributions. However, neither chloride nor oxygen-18 is an ideal hydrologic tracer: chloride concentrations in streamwater can be affected by dry deposition, evapoconcentration and biogeochemical cycling, and water isot...

The hydrologic connectivity between hillslopes and streams impacts the geomorphological evolution of catchments. Here, we propose a conceptual model for hydrogeomorphological evolution of the Susquehanna Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory (SSHCZO), a first-order catchment developed on shale in central Pennsylvania, U.S.A. At SSHCZO, the majority of available water (the difference between inc...

The goods and services that lakes provide result from complex interactions between meteorology, hydrology, nutrient loads and in-lake processes. Hydrology and nutrient loads are, in turn, influenced by socio-economic factors such as human habitation, water abstraction and land-management, within their catchments. Models provide a means of linking these different domains and also of forecasting ...

Panoramic views of natural environments provide visually navigating animals with two kinds of information: they define locations because image differences increase smoothly with distance from a reference location and they provide compass information, because image differences increase smoothly with rotation away from a reference orientation. The range over which a given reference image can prov...

The mean annual transfer (loss and retention) of nitrogen in a river system was estimated using a conceptual approach based on water surface area and runoff. Two different approaches for the calculation of water surface area were applied to determine riverine nitrogen retention in four European catchments, ranging between 860-14,000 km2 in area, and differing considerably in the proportion and ...

[1] Estimates of mean residence time (MRT) are increasingly used as simple summary descriptors of the hydrological processes involving storage and mixing of water within catchment systems. Current understanding of the physical controls on MRT remains limited, and various hypotheses have been proposed to explain its variability between catchments. We present a series of virtual experiments to in...

An evaluation of the performance of a physically-based distributed model of a small Mediterranean mountain catchment is presented. This was carried out using hydrological response data, including measurements of runoff, soil moisture, phreatic surface level and actual evapotranspiration. A-priori model parameterisation was based as far as possible on property data measured in the catchment. Lim...

In catchments adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, there is growing concern that sediments and nutrients being exported from the land are having a detrimental effect on coral reef communities. Monitoring programs have been initiated in the Burdekin catchment to determine rates of sediment runoff and to provide important base line data against which to evaluate any future effe...