This report contains the results of a 6-year project conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development on stream incision and meadow ecosystem degradation in the central Great Basin. The project included a coarse-scale assessment of 56 different meadows systems coupled wit...

Knowledge of weather, particularly precipitation, is fundamental to interpreting watershed and hydrologic processes. The long-term weather record in the Goodwater Creek Experimental Watershed (GCEW) complements hydrologic and water quality data in the region. The GCEW also is the core of the Central Mississippi River Basin (CMRB) node of the Long-Term Agroecosystem Research network. Our objecti...

Human use of freshwater resources has altered the dynamics of hydrologic regimes in rivers around the world. Frequency, timing, and periodicity of extreme fluctuations in water flow have been modified, disrupting the flow regimes to which lotic biota have adapted over evolutionary time. The goal of the proposed research is to increase our understanding of how the hydrologic regime modulates lin...

325 Land hydrologic responses to meteorological forcing involve complicated exchanges of moisture and energy between soil, vegetation, snowpack, groundwater, and the overlying atmospheric boundary layer. These exchanges occur in the form of many interactive natural hydrologic processes, including precipitation, snow and soil water melting and freezing, infi ltration, storage and movement of soi...

Environmental filtering is an important community assembly process influencing species distributions. Contrasting species abundance patterns along environmental gradients are commonly used to provide evidence for environmental filtering. However, the same abundance patterns may result from alternative or concurrent assembly processes. Experimental tests are an important means to decipher whethe...

An object-oriented design (OOD) approach is used to describe watershed scale hydrologic processes. Individual objects (or processes) at multiple levels are described using the ‘inheritance’ concept, while the interactions of objects (or processes) are described using the ‘aggregation’ concept. This design methodology is applied to create the new watershed based hydrological model OBJTOP (OBJect...

The introduction and advancement of spatial information technologies such as remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) have provided many (software) tools that assist in natural resource planning and management. GIS technology has particularly provided many cost-effective tools for evaluating land use/land cover (LU/LC) and the implications of different land use practices within a...

Accurate streamflow predictions are crucial for mitigating flood damage and addressing operational flood scenarios. In recent years, sequential data assimilation methods have drawn attention due to their potential to handle explicitly the various sources of uncertainty in hydrologic models. In this study, we implement two ensemble-based sequential data assimilation methods for streamflow foreca...