Effects of woody vegetation on shallow soil moisture at a semiarid montane catchment

Traff, Devin

doi:10.1002/eco.1542

Cited by 14 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…Vegetation (fPAR and actual evapotranspiration) was also important in explaining BFI variability in all regions. Similar insights have been made with regard to the forest growth stage and BFI, (Lacey & Grayson, 1998) and soil moisture reduction has also been related to woody vegetation (Traff, Niemann, Middlekauff, & Lehman, 2015).…”

Section: Variability In Climate and Vegetation Effects On Streamflosupporting

confidence: 69%

Regional variation in streamflow drivers across a continental climatic gradient

et al. 2017

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Streamflow characteristics are driven by specific flow‐generation mechanisms, which are in turn determined by the biophysical properties of catchments. They provide important environmental services for society and ecosystems, regulating water supply and quality, flood mitigation, and the biological diversity of aquatic ecosystems. This study investigates how the drivers of streamflow characteristics vary at the level of regional management (regional [104 km2] and continental scales [107 km2]) in eastern Australia. Three hydrological signatures were used to represent streamflow characteristics: runoff coefficient, baseflow index, and zero flow ratio. Long‐term streamflow data and 24 spatially distributed biophysical properties from 354 catchments in eastern Australia were analysed with random forest and generalized additive beta regression models to determine the dominant drivers of streamflow characteristics. We found that the main drivers of streamflow characteristics cannot be generalized from region to region and that specific biophysical variables govern their spatial variability. However, some important drivers such as the dryness index and the fraction of photosynthetically active radiation from vegetation explain the variability of streamflow characteristics at both regional and continental scales with differing importance. Our findings also suggest that soil properties have a significant effect on streamflow characteristics at regional scales. However, the relative importance of these soil properties varies among regions depending on the streamflow characteristics. This paper demonstrates that the drivers of streamflow characteristics are scale and region dependent, and biogeographically different regions have specific mechanisms governing streamflow. It opens an avenue to better connect the management perspectives of ecology and hydrology.

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Section: Variability In Climate and Vegetation Effects On Streamflosupporting

confidence: 69%

Regional variation in streamflow drivers across a continental climatic gradient

et al. 2017

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“…The Cache la Poudre catchment is located near Rustic, Colorado and is in the Southern Rockies ecoregion (Omernik, 1987;Traff, 2013). The catchment area is approximately 8.0 ha, and the climate is semi-arid with 415 mm mean annual precipitation (Lehman and Niemann, 2008).…”

Section: Cache La Poudrementioning

confidence: 99%

A method to downscale soil moisture to fine resolutions using topographic, vegetation, and soil data

Ranney

Niemann

Lehman

et al. 2015

Advances in Water Resources

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Additional testing is performed using the Tarrawarra and Nerrigundah catchments where vegetation is relatively homogeneous and limited soil data are available for interpolation. For Cache la Poudre, the estimated soil moisture patterns improve substantially when the vegetation and soil data are used in addition to topographic data, and the performance is similar for the iii EMT+VS and EOF models. Adding spatially-interpolated soil data to the topographic data at Tarrawarra and Nerrigundah decreases model performance and results in worse performance than the EOF method, in which the soil data are not highly weighted. These results suggest that the soil data must have greater spatial detail to be useful to the EMT+VS model. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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“…The calibrated parameters suggest that interception and root water uptake reduce the soil moisture more than shading increases it. This behavior might be unrealistic because previous studies in semiarid watersheds have shown that vegetation cover is associated with greater soil moisture at shallow depths [ D'Odorico et al ., ; Traff et al ., ]. Furthermore, this type of vegetation dependence predicts very dry conditions for the irrigated agricultural fields, which is also unlikely.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another class of downscaling methods use topographic and vegetation data because these variables have been shown to be related to fine scale soil moisture variations [Western et al, 1999;Gomez-Plaza et al, 2001;Brocca et al, 2007;Traff et al, 2015]. These downscaling methods often reach 10-30 m resolutions, but they typically have been applied to small catchments with low topographic relief.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration patterns on downscaling soil moisture in regions with large topographic relief

Cowley

Niemann

Green

et al. 2017

Water Resources Research

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Soil moisture can be estimated at coarse resolutions (>1 km) using satellite remote sensing, but that resolution is poorly suited for many applications. The Equilibrium Moisture from Topography, Vegetation, and Soil (EMT+VS) model downscales coarse‐resolution soil moisture using fine‐resolution topographic, vegetation, and soil data to produce fine‐resolution (10–30 m) estimates of soil moisture. The EMT+VS model performs well at catchments with low topographic relief (≤124 m), but it has not been applied to regions with larger ranges of elevation. Large relief can produce substantial variations in precipitation and potential evapotranspiration (PET), which might affect the fine‐resolution patterns of soil moisture. In this research, simple methods to downscale temporal average precipitation and PET are developed and included in the EMT+VS model, and the effects of spatial variations in these variables on the surface soil moisture estimates are investigated. The methods are tested against ground truth data at the 239 km2 Reynolds Creek watershed in southern Idaho, which has 1145 m of relief. The precipitation and PET downscaling methods are able to capture the main features in the spatial patterns of both variables. The space‐time Nash‐Sutcliffe coefficients of efficiency of the fine‐resolution soil moisture estimates improve from 0.33 to 0.36 and 0.41 when the precipitation and PET downscaling methods are included, respectively. PET downscaling provides a larger improvement in the soil moisture estimates than precipitation downscaling likely because the PET pattern is more persistent through time, and thus more predictable, than the precipitation pattern.

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Effects of woody vegetation on shallow soil moisture at a semiarid montane catchment

Abstract: iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Cited by 14 publications

References 85 publications

Regional variation in streamflow drivers across a continental climatic gradient

Regional variation in streamflow drivers across a continental climatic gradient

A method to downscale soil moisture to fine resolutions using topographic, vegetation, and soil data

Impacts of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration patterns on downscaling soil moisture in regions with large topographic relief

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