Center for Advanced Water Research

Globally various environmental conditions generate spatially and temporally heterogeneous rainfall patterns, with varying amounts and frequencies of rainfall. Landscapes have been changed by not only natural forcing (e.g., fluvial flows, landslides, tectonic uplift, etc.) but also from anthropogenic pressure (e.g., urbanization, reclamation, intensive food-fiber production, etc.). Hence, these heterogeneous land uses co-exist, in interesting spatial patterns, over a watershed. Especially for a highly human-impacted watershed, non-uniform land uses are distributed, resulting in the generation of spatially erratic hydrologic responses (e.g. stream flows) to rainfall events. Spatial patterns of land use also contribute contaminant loads (e.g., nutrients, pesticides, sediments, etc.), which impact stream water quality, and impact aquatic habitat integrity. Moreover, the erratic flow and load dynamics in stream networks could cause adverse impacts on the health of aquatic ecosystems. In this context, my PhD research aims to understand the coupled relation among stochastic rainfall forcing, heterogeneous landscape filtering, spatial-temporal dynamics of flows and loads in stream networks, and aquatic ecosystems responses (e.g., eutrophication).

References

Basu, N. B., Thompson, S. E., & Rao, P. S. C. (2011). Hydrologic and biogeochemical functioning of intensively managed catchments: A synthesis of top‐down analyses. Water Resources Research, 47(10).

Botter, G., Basso, S., Rodriguez-Iturbe, I., & Rinaldo, A. (2013). Resilience of river flow regimes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(32), 12925-12930.

Coutu, S., Del Giudice, D., Rossi, L., & Barry, D. A. (2012). Parsimonious hydrological modeling of urban sewer and river catchments. Journal of Hydrology, 464, 477-484

Jäger, C. G., Hagemann, J., & Borchardt, D. (2017). Can nutrient pathways and biotic interactions control eutrophication in riverine ecosystems? Evidence from a model driven mesocosm experiment. Water Research, 115, 162-171.

Kamjunke, N., Büttner, O., Jäger, C. G., Marcus, H., von Tümpling, W., Halbedel, S., ... & Borchardt, D. (2013). Biogeochemical patterns in a river network along a land use gradient. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 185(11), 9221-9236.

Mejía, A., Daly, E., Rossel, F., Jovanovic, T., & Gironás, J. (2014). A stochastic model of streamflow for urbanized basins. Water Resources Research, 50(3), 1984-2001.

Widder, S., Besemer, K., Singer, G. A., Ceola, S., Bertuzzo, E., Quince, C., ... & Battin, T. J. (2014). Fluvial network organization imprints on microbial co-occurrence networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(35), 12799-12804.