Untitled DocumentRiparian vegetation change, variable hydrology, and ecological processes
Macro Theme Area:
River Systems [Project ID: R31]
PI:
Travis Huxman
CO-PI(s):
N/A
Basin focus:
San Pedro
Specific area in
basin /
field sites:
We have primary field sites at Lewis Springs and Charleston.
Summary/Goals: This project is aimed at understanding how historical and predicted vegetation change influences water use within the San Pedro River riparian corridor, and how hydrologic condition and vegetation change may act as a coupled ecohydrologic system. This project is composed of several lines of research that build in sophistication, including: (1) measuring and modeling evapotranspiration (ET) from dominant vegetation, (2) coupling modeling of feedbacks within the integrated biogeochemical-hydrologic-ecologic system, and (3) coupling ET models with regional GW model.
Activities and outcomes during past year:
We are still working on our 'first pass' water use product and constructing a more sophisticated 'crop coefficient' ET model and upscaled it with remotely sensed data for multiple years.
Plans for the upcoming year:
Our goal is to expand on our understanding of water use and carbon exchanges by considering the role of interannual variability in driving ET dynamics as a function of how plant functional types influences water use from different sources in the soil profile, and how characteristics of whole ecosystem constrains water use. Also in this is an attempt to understand how these different functional types contribute to soil carbon cycling.
