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Catchment hydro-biogeochemical response to forest harvest intensity and spatial pattern
Citation:
Abdelnour, A., M. Stieglitz, F. Pan, AND R. B. MCKANE. Catchment hydro-biogeochemical response to forest harvest intensity and spatial pattern. Presented at American Geophysical Union fall meeting, San Francisco, CA, December 14 - 18, 2009.
Impact/Purpose:
We apply a new model, Visualizing Ecosystems for Land Management Assessment (VELMA), to Watershed 10 (WS10) in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest to simulate the effects of harvest intensity and spatial pattern on catchment hydrological and biogeochemical processes.
Description:
We apply a new model, Visualizing Ecosystems for Land Management Assessment (VELMA), to Watershed 10 (WS10) in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest to simulate the effects of harvest intensity and spatial pattern on catchment hydrological and biogeochemical processes. Specifically, we test for the occurrence of hydrological and biogeochemical threshold behavior in the catchment response. VELMA is a spatially-distributed eco-hydrology model that simulates the effects of climate and land cover on daily changes in soil water storage, surface and subsurface runoff, vertical drainage, evapotranspiration, vegetation and soil C and N dynamics, and transport of nitrate, ammonium, DON, and DOC to streams. We simulate pre- and post-disturbance hydrological and biogeochemical responses of the WS10 catchment. Model parameters were initialized to simulate the post-fire build-up of ecosystem C and N stocks from 1725 to 1975. These parameters are then fixed and used to simulate the hydro-biogeochemical response after the 1975 clear-cut. Comparison of modeled and observed soil moisture, streamflow, DIN, DON and DOC losses for the post-clear-cut period (1975-2007) show that VELMA accurately captures spatial and temporal dynamics of hydrological and biogeochemical processes in WS10. We then examine the catchment response to alternative clear-cut scenarios for which the location and fraction of harvested area varied. These alternative clear-cut simulations suggest that the streamflow and harvest area relationship in this rain-dominated catchment is nearly linear, irrespective of clear-cut area and location. Simulations designed to identify threshold responses of DOC, DON and DIN export in relation to harvest area and location will be presented.