Despite the significant role of precipitation in the hydrological cycle, few studies have been conducted to evaluate the impacts of the temporal resolution of rainfall inputs on the performance of SWAT (soil and water assessment tool) models in large-sized river basins. In this study, both daily and hourly rainfall observations at 28 rainfall stations were used as inputs to SWAT for daily strea...

The spatial organization of functional vegetation types in river basins is a major determinant of their runoff production, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. The optimization of different objective functions has been suggested to control the adaptive behavior of plants and ecosystems, often without a compelling justification. Maximum entropy production (MEP), rooted in thermodynamics princip...

The article proposes a model for integrated management of a regulated watershed. In such systems, it is important to take into account not only the discharge released at the reservoir, but also the natural flows due to rainfall. The proposed model incorporates both inputs, and can be refined by considering different numbers of sub-basins corresponding to tributaries of the river. We discuss the...

Microbiological contamination is an important water-quality problem worldwide. Human impact on this category of contamination is significant and several human-related activities, and also the population explosion, have affected and are still affecting dramatically the aquatic environment. Extensive industrialization and agriculture have led to increased pollution and hydromorphological changes ...

Aeglidae are anomuran freshwater “crabs” found only in southern South America. In Brazil, the greatest species diversity occurs in hydrographic basins of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Two new species, Aegla georginae and Aegla ludwigi, are described from the Ibicuí and Ijuí Rivers, respectively (Uruguay River Basin). The new taxa can be distinguished from other Aegla species based on both mor...

Laser Profiler (LP) data from aerial laser surveys have been increasingly used as topographical inputs to numerical simulations of flooding and inundation in river basins. LP data has great potential for reproducing topography, but its effective usage has not yet been fully established. In this study, flooding and inundation are simulated numerically using LP data for the Jobaru River basin of ...

Cell-to-cell surface flow paths are commonly derived from gridded digital elevation models (DEM) by choosing the direction of steepest descent to one of the eight surrounding cells. However, adequate DEMs often are not available. We developed a topography-independent method for creating gridded, land and stream drainage direction maps based on corrected vector river networks. We applied it to t...

Following the initial fall out from Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP), a significant amount of radiocesium has been discharged from Abukuma River into the Pacific Ocean. This study attempted to numerically simulate the flux of radiocesium into Abukuma River by developing the multiple compartment model which incorporate the transport process of the radionuclide from the ground surfa...

The former and present distribution of white clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes) in the province of Granada (southern Spain) is studied. Before 1980 it was widely distributed but at present only 16 populations exist. The decline is related to the presence of the freshwater red-swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii), an American species, vector of the aphanomycosis disease, introduced to t...

This paper presents de use of the Spin model checker as the core engine to build Decision Support Systems (DSSs) to control complex river basins during flood situations. Current DSSs in this domain are mostly based on simulators to predict the rainfall and the water flow along the river basin. In this paper, we propose a scheme that integrates simulators in the water domain with additional logi...