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...

Important catchment-scale water and energy balance parameters are derived for a small catchment in southeastern Australia by assimilation in a catchment-scale soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer (SVAT) model of subcatchment-scale soil water content observations and land surface temperature measurements. In order to incorporate the subcatchment-scale soil moisture variability and its time evolut...

Distributed/semi-distributed models are considered to be sensitive to the spatial resolution of the data input. In this paper, we take a small catchment in high urbanized Yangtze River Delta, Qinhuai catchment as study area, to analyze the impact of spatial resolution of precipitation and the potential evapotranspiration (PET) on the long-term runoff and flood runoff process. The data source in...

Playa wetlands are important areas of soil organic carbon and nutrient storage in drylands. We conducted this study to assess how catchment biophysical variables control soil organic carbon and nitrogen in playas and how playas function differently than upland ecosystems. We found that playa organic carbon and nitrogen corresponded primarily with catchment vegetation cover and secondarily with ...

We investigated the influence of hillslope scale topographic characteristics and the relative position of hillslopes along streams (i.e., internal catchment structure) on the isotopic composition of base flow in first-order, forested headwater streams at Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory. The study focused on two adjacent forested catchments with different topographic characteristics. We used stabl...