Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Water Resource Management
Stream Thermalscape Scenarios for British Columbia, Canada
Published: 2023-03-22
Subjects: Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management
Water temperature is a key feature of freshwater ecosystems but comprehensive datasets are severely lacking, a limiting factor in research and management of freshwater species and habitats. An existing statistical stream temperature model developed for British Columbia, Canada, was refit to predict August mean stream temperatures, a common index of stream thermal regime also used in thermalscapes [...]
Data, knowledge and modeling challenges for science-informed management of river deltas
Published: 2023-03-16
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
450 million people live on river deltas and thus on land that is precariously low above the sea level and sinking because of human activities and natural processes. Although global debates around coastal risk typically focus on sea level rise, it is sinking lands and rising seas that together endanger lives and livelihoods in river deltas. However, the ability to quantify and address those risks [...]
Addressing Tidal Flooding Induced uncertainties in Satellite Derived Global Salt Marsh Change Studies: Impact on Blue Carbon Monitoring
Published: 2023-03-04
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Other Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
In the past few years, it has been established that remote sensing of wetlands change analysis studies would require careful examination of tidal flooding produced uncertainties in satellite datasets. Tide flagging and filtering mechanisms are required to reduce per-pixel variabilities and errors in change detection. We present a technical note summarizing the potential impact of a lack of tide [...]
Large variation in Mekong river plastic transport between wet and dry season
Published: 2023-02-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Plastic pollution in rivers is of increased global concern. Rivers act both as pathways for land-based plastic waste into the ocean, and as plastic reservoirs for long-term retention. Reliable observations are key to designing, optimizing and evaluating strategies to prevent and reduce plastic pollution. Several measurement methods have been developed to quantify macroplastic ($>$0.5 cm) storage [...]
Considerable gaps in our global knowledge of potential groundwater accessibility
Published: 2023-02-11
Subjects: Geology, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
At what depth groundwater can be found below the land surface is key to understanding whether it is potentially accessible to ecosystems and humans, or what role it plays in the water cycle. Knowledge of ground-water table depth (WTD) exists at regional scales in many places, but a bottom-up knowledge aggregation to obtain a coherent global picture is exceptionally challenging. Uncertainty in [...]
Comparing Well and Geophysical Data for Temperature Monitoring within a Bayesian Experimental Design Framework
Published: 2023-01-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Temperature logs are an important tool in the geothermal industry. Temperature measurements from boreholes are used for exploration, system design, and monitoring. The number of observations, however, is not always sufficient to fully determine the temperature field or explore the entire parameter space of interest. Drilling in the best locations is still difficult and expensive. It is therefore [...]
Uncertainties in Water Scarcity Index due to water use and climate changes: Case of two Legal Amazon watersheds
Published: 2022-12-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water scarcity is a major global problem with the potential to impact socioeconomic development and the environment. Currently, mitigating issues related to the lack of water has become an aim for the public and private sectors. Water scarcity can be estimated by the ratio between water use (withdrawal or consumption) and water availability (a minimum discharge), named Water Stress Index (WSI). [...]
The Dry Sky: Futures for Humanity’s Modification of the Atmospheric Water Cycle
Published: 2022-12-22
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Meteorology, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Humanity is modifying the atmospheric water cycle, via land use, climate change, air pollution, and weather modification. Given the implications of this, we present a theoretical framing of atmospheric water as an economic good. Historically, atmospheric water was tacitly considered a ‘public good’ since it was neither actively consumed (rival) nor controlled (exclusive). However, given [...]
The unknown fate of macroplastic in mountain rivers
Published: 2022-11-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Mountain rivers are typically seen as relatively pristine ecosystems, supporting numerous goods (e.g., water resources) for human populations living not only in the mountain regions but also downstream from them. Recent evidence suggests, however, that mountain river valleys in populated areas can be substantially polluted by macroplastic (plastic item > 5 mm). It is, however, unknown how [...]
In Defense of Metrics: Metrics Sufficiently Encode Typical Human Preferences Regarding Hydrological Model Performance
Published: 2022-10-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Building accurate rainfall-runoff models is an integral part of hydrological science and practice. The variety of modeling goals and applications have led to a large suite of evaluation metrics for these models. Yet, hydrologists still put considerable trust into visual judgment, although it is unclear whether such judgment agrees or disagrees with existing quantitative metrics. In this study, we [...]
Geochemical mapping by unmixing alluvial sediments: An example from northern Australia
Published: 2022-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geomorphology, Natural Resource Economics, Sedimentology, Soil Science, Water Resource Management
Alluvial sediments have long been used in geochemical surveys as their compositions are assumed to be representative of areas upstream. Overbank and floodplain sediments, in particular, are increasingly used for regional to continental-scale geochemical mapping. However, during downstream transport, sediments from heterogeneous source regions are carried away from their source regions and mixed. [...]
Groundwatersheds of protected areas reveal globally overlooked risks and opportunities
Published: 2022-09-23
Subjects: Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management
Protected areas are a key tool for conserving biodiversity, sustaining ecosystem services and improving human well-being. Global initiatives that aim to expand and connect protected areas generally focus on controlling ‘above ground’ impacts such as land use, overlooking the potential for human actions in adjacent areas to affect protected areas through groundwater flow. Here, we assess the [...]
A Simple Framework for Calibrating Hydraulic Flood Inundation Models using Crowd-sourced Water Levels
Published: 2022-08-24
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Fluid Dynamics, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Floods are the most commonly occurring natural disaster, with the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters 2021 report on “The Non-COVID Year in Disasters” estimating economic losses worth over USD 51 million and over 6000 fatalities in 2020. The hydrodynamic models which are used for flood forecasting need to be evaluated and constrained using observations of water depth and extent. [...]
Improved estimation of phytoplankton abundance and fine-scale water quality features via simultaneous discrete and semi-continuous surveys
Published: 2022-08-06
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Environmental Monitoring, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography, Water Resource Management
The abundance and distribution of phytoplankton is driven by light and nutrient availability which in turn is controlled by larger-scale regional processes such as climatic variability and global teleconnections. However, such estimates are largely built on evidence gathered from coarse (on the order of kilometers), discrete grab sampling networks where the overall set of measured parameters is [...]
MacroSheds: a synthesis of long-term biogeochemical, hydroclimatic, and geospatial data from small watershed ecosystem studies
Published: 2022-08-04
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
The U.S. Federal Government supports hundreds of watershed ecosystem monitoring efforts from which solute fluxes can be calculated. While details of instrumentation and sampling methods vary across these studies, the types of data collected and the questions that motivate their analysis are remarkably similar. Nevertheless, little effort toward the compilation of these datasets has previously [...]