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Catchment hydro-biogeochemical response to climate change and future land-use
Citation:
Abdelnour, A., M. Stieglitz, R. B. MCKANE, AND F. Pan. Catchment hydro-biogeochemical response to climate change and future land-use. Presented at Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, San Francisco, CA, December 13 - 17, 2010.
Impact/Purpose:
The potential interacting effects of climate change and future land-use on hydrological and biogeochemical dynamics rarely have been described at the catchment level and are difficult or impossible to capture through experimentation or observation alone.
Description:
The potential interacting effects of climate change and future land-use on hydrological and biogeochemical dynamics rarely have been described at the catchment level and are difficult or impossible to capture through experimentation or observation alone. We apply a new model, Visualizing Ecosystems for Land Management Assessment (VELMA), to the H.J. Andrews (HJA) Experimental Forest in western Oregon, USA, to simulate the effects of multiple, future climate and land-use scenarios on catchment hydrology and soil C and N dynamics. VELMA is a spatially distributed eco-hydrology model that links hydrological and biogeochemical processes within watersheds. The model simulates daily to century-scale changes in soil water infiltration and redistribution, evapotranspiration, surface and subsurface runoff, carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling in plants and soils, and the transport of dissolved forms of carbon and nitrogen from the terrestrial landscape to streams. VELMA was previously calibrated and validated for the HJA based on long-term data (1975-2008) describing daily to decadal changes in stream discharge and chemistry, soil and plant carbon, and nitrogen dynamics in response to climate, harvest and fire. That exercise demonstrated that the same set of model parameters accurately simulates hydro-biogeochemical dynamics at multiple spatial scales at HJA, from a small (10 ha) catchment to the 64 km2 HJA basin. Here we use this validated VELMA model to (1) explore the effects of climate change scenarios on catchment hydro-biogeochemical dynamics, and (2) examine forest harvest effects (clearcutting) across climate scenarios on catchment hydro-biogeochemical dynamics in this old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest.