Functional Land Management (FLM) is proposed as an integrator for sustainability policies and assesses the functional capacity of the soil and land to deliver primary productivity, water purification and regulation, carbon cycling and storage, habitat for biodiversity and recycling of nutrients. This paper presents the catchment challenge as a method to bridge the gap between science, stakehold...

The hydrological catchment areas are commonly extracted from digital elevation models (DEMs). The shortcoming is that computations for large areas are very time consuming and even may be impractical. Furthermore, the DEM may be inaccessible or in a poor quality. This chapter presents an algorithm to approximate the medial axis of river networks, which leads to catchment area delineation. We pro...

The runoff of pesticides (insecticides, herbicides and fungicides) from agricultural lands is a key concern for the health of the iconic Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Relatively low levels of herbicide residues can reduce the productivity of marine plants and corals. However, the risk of these residues to Great Barrier Reef ecosystems has been poorly quantified due to a lack of large-scale dat...

This paper examines how the combination of simulated discharge and mean catchment residence time (MRT) may be used to subsume flow path process complexity and provide a simple, scalable evaluative data source for water quantity-quality based conceptual models at the catchment scale. A simple Monte Carlo framework is used to evaluate the identifiability of parameters, and how values of mean resi...

Debris flows are among the most destructive of all water-related disasters. They mainly affect mountain areas in a wide range of morphoclimatic environments. Therefore, accurate prediction of their run out distances, magnitudes and velocities plays a role of paramount importance, in order to plan and design appropriate structural and non-structural defence measures. In this context, a number of...

Recent policy directions aimed at improving water quality entering the Great Barrier Reef lagoon require targets to be set for catchment sourced contaminants. Catchment models can assist in identifying pollutant loads and quantifying the impact of ameliorative land management practices on these loads at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. However, the use of catchment models by natural re...

A GIS-based method is proposed for computation of temporal variation of sediment yield during isolated storm events. Data from three Indian catchments, namely Karso and Nagwa in Jharkhand and Kharkari in Rajasthan, have been used. The Integrated Land and Water Information System (ILW1S) GIS package was used for (a) catchment discretization into cell areas using grid networks, (b) evaluation of ...

Boreal stream networks are embedded in a mosaic of wetlands and lakes interspersed in the forest landscape. This mosaic results in complex and dynamic water chemistry that varies depending on stream size, catchment characteristics, season and flow. Spatiotemporal variations in stream acidity are however frequently predictable based on spatial patterns in the terrestrial watershed, and acidity h...

There are limitations in using monthly rainfall totals in studies of rainfall climatology as well as in hydrological and agricultural investigations. Variations in rainfall may be considered to result from frequency changes in the daily rainfall of the respective regime. In the present study, daily rainfall data of the stations inside the Koyna catchment has been analysed for the period of 1961...

Land use is known to alter the nature of land-water interactions, but the potential effects of widespread forest management on headwaters in boreal regions remain poorly understood. We evaluated the importance of catchment land use, land cover, and local stream variables for macroinvertebrate community and functional trait diversity in 18 boreal headwater streams. Variation in macroinvertebrate...