Hillslope runoff and leaching studies, catchment-scale water quality measurements and P retention and release characteristics of stream bank and catchment soils were used to better understand reasons behind the reported ineffectiveness of riparian buffers for phosphorus (P) management in catchments with sandy soils from south-west Western Australia (WA). Catchment-scale water quality measuremen...

A decline in marine water quality entering the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) lagoon is associated with terrestrial runoff discharged from adjacent GBR catchments. Reef Plan 2013 outlines water quality targets to address this decline, with the eWater CRC Source Catchment modelling framework used to report progress towards meeting these targets. Catchment modelling is an ideal tool to investigate cons...

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is an important vehicle for the movement of nutrients from terrestrial to aquatic systems. To investigate how the source and composition of aquatic DOM change in both space and time, we used chemical, spectroscopic, and isotopic analyses to characterize DOM in a headwater catchment in the Colorado Front Range. Streamwater samples for DOM analyses were collected fr...

An alluvial aquifer can be described as a groundwater system, generally unconfined, that is hosted in laterally discontinuous layers of gravel, sand, silt and clay, deposited by a river in a river channel, banks or flood plain. In semi-arid regions, streams that are associated with alluvial aquifers tend to vary from discharge water bodies in the dry season, to recharge water bodies during cert...

Mountain beech (Nothofagus solandri var. solandri) trunk diameters were measured in each of two catchments, a control, and a stream catchment (a putative lahar path), to assess the vulnerability of a hut sited on the Wakapapaiti Stream, Tongariro National Park, to disturbance events. Beech forest margins were more abrupt, terraced, and were adjacent to rocky areas in the stream catchment, while...

High-head storage hydropower schemes in Alpine areas are required to produce peak energy and to regulate electricity grids. Nevertheless the unsteady turbine operations induce hydropeaking in the river downstream of the powerhouse. The developed hydrological-hydraulic model can simulate glacier melt, snow pack constitution and melt, soil infiltration and run-off as well as hydraulic structures ...

It is often assumed that stable water isotopes (dD and d18O) provide redundant information for a given sample of water. In this note we illustrate that the choice of isotope used may influence the resultant hydrograph separation. This is especially true in light of the spatial and temporal variability in the isotopic composition of rainfall water at the catchment scale. We present several possi...

[1] Isotopic hydrograph separation (IHS) to define sources of event and preevent water during hydrological episodes has greatly improved the understanding of water, solute, and contaminant transport to streams during recent decades. However, the large variation in snowmelt isotopic composition, caused by fractionation during melting, has impeded an accurate separation of streamflow during sprin...

Rainfall-runoff processes in a small oil palm catchment (8.2 ha) in Johor, Malaysia were examined. Storm hydrographs show rapid responses to rainfall with a short time to peak. The estimated initial hydrologic loss for the oil palm catchment is 5 mm. Despite the low initial loss, the catchment exhibits a high proportion of baseflow, approximately 54% of the total runoff. On an event basis, the ...

This paper presents CAMEL, a spatially-distributed conceptual model for simulating reactive transport of phosphorus from diffuse sources at the catchment scale. A catchment is represented in the model using a network of grid cells and each grid cell is comprised of various conceptual storages of water, sediment and phosphorus. To allow for reactive transport processes of phosphorus between grid...