This article presents snow hydrology updates made to iTree-Hydro, previously called the Urban Forest Effects—Hydrology model. iTree-Hydro Version 1 was a warm climate model developed by the USDA Forest Service to provide a process-based planning tool with robust water quantity and quality predictions given data limitations common to most urban areas. Cold climate hydrology routines presented in...

Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevail in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the sustainability of rangeland management. We show that a rain-index insurance with frequent payoffs, i....

Adapting what we currently know about ecosystems to a future where rangelands are changing is a new frontier in rangeland management. Current tools for knowledge discovery and application are limited because they cannot adequately judge ecological relevance of knowledge to specific situations. We propose development of integrated knowledge systems (KSs)— collections of resources (e.g., data, an...

Medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae (L.) Nevski) is an exotic annual grass invading rangelands in the western United States. Medusahead is a serious management concern because it decreases biodiversity, reduces livestock forage production, and degrades the ecological function of rangelands. Despite the obvious importance of ranchers as partners in preventing and managing medusahead in rangel...

INTRODUCTION Analyzing trends of land use systems and the changes occurred overtime is an effective way of assessing the impacts of land use/land cover (LULC) changes on ecosystem function. It provides important insights for understanding the spatial patterns of land use processes. The rangelands of southern Ethiopia are adversely affected by increased human population pressure, encroachment of...

Humans have exerted large-scale changes on the terrestrial biosphere, primarily through agriculture; however, the impacts of such changes on the hydrologic cycle are poorly understood. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that the conversion of natural rangeland ecosystems to agricultural ecosystems impacts the subsurface portion of the hydrologic cycle by changing groundwater r...

Since artificial neural networks (ANNs) can approximate any function, they have been applied in many fields including hydrology. In hydrology, there are important issues such as flood estimation and predicting rainfall-runoff in a certain area. In this presentation, we briefly introduce a popular feed-forward neural network model, so called “multi-layer perceptron (MLP)”, and review its applica...

Namibia is a semi-arid country with erratic and unpredictable rainfall. Extreme weather patterns, such as floods extensive droughts, have become more common in recent years, strong impact on surface ground water availability, rangeland agricultural productivity, food security, further land degradation, bush encroachment or soil erosion. The previous 10 years were characterized by perennial drou...