Socio-hydrologic drivers of the pendulum swing between agricultural development and environmental health: A case study from Murrumbidgee River basin, Australia

This paper presents a case study centred on the Murrumbidgee River basin in eastern Australia. It illustrates the dynamics of the balance between water extraction and use for food production, and efforts to mitigate and reverse consequent degradation of the riparian environment. In particular, the paper traces the history of a pendulum swing between an exclusive focus on agricultural development and food production in the initial stages and its attendant socio-economic benefits, followed by the gradual realization of the adverse environmental impacts, subsequent efforts to mitigate these with the use of remedial measures, and ultimately concerted efforts and externally imposed solutions to restore environmental health and ecosystem services. The 100-year history of development within the Murrumbidgee is divided into four eras, each underpinned by the dominance of different values and norms and turning points characterized by their changes. The various stages of development can be characterized by the dominance, in turn, of infrastructure systems, policy frameworks, economic instruments, and technological solutions. The paper argues that, to avoid these costly pendulum swings, management needs to be underpinned by long-term coupled socio-hydrologic system models that explicitly include the two-way coupling between human and hydrological systems, including the slow evolution of human values and norms relating to water and the environment. Such coupled human-water system models can provide insights into dominant controls of the trajectory of their co-evolution in a given system, and can also be used to interpret patterns of co-evolution of such coupled systems in different places across gradients of climatic, socio-economic and socio-cultural conditions, and in this way to help develop generalizable understanding. © 2014 Author(s)

Soil moisture controls on patterns of grass green-up in Inner Mongolia: an index based approach

Water availability is one of the most important environmental controls on vegetation phenology, especially in semi-arid regions. It is often represented in terms of soil moisture in small-scale studies, whereas it tends to be represented by precipitation in large-scale (e.g., regional) studies. Clearly, soil moisture is the more appropriate indicator for root water uptake and vegetation growth/phenology. Its potential advantage and applicability needs to be demonstrated at regional scales. The paper presents a data-based regional study of the effectiveness of novel water and temperature-based indices to predict spring vegetation green-up dates based on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) observations in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, China. The macro-scale hydrological model, VIC (Variable Infiltration Capacity), is employed to generate a soil moisture database across the region. In addition to a standard index based on temperature, two potential hydrology-based indices for prediction of spring onset dates are defined, based on the simulated soil moisture data as well as on observed precipitation data. Results indicate that the correspondence between the NDVI-derived green-up onset date and the soil-moisture-derived potential onset date exhibits a significantly better correlation as a function of increasing aridity compared to that based on precipitation. In this way the soil-moisture-based index is demonstrated to be superior to the precipitation-based index in terms of capturing grassland spring phenology. The results also showed that both of the hydrological (water-based) indices were superior to the thermal (temperature-based) index in determining the patterns of grass green-up in the Inner Mongolia region, indicating water availability to be the dominant control on average. The understanding about the relative controls on grassland phenology and the effectiveness of alternative indices to capture these controls are important for future studies of vegetation phenology change under climate change

Catchment classification:hydrological analysis of catchment behavior through process-based modeling along a climate gradient

Catchment classification is an efficient method to synthesize our understanding of how climate variability and catchment characteristics interact to define hydrological response. One way to accomplish catchment classification is to empirically relate climate and catchment characteristics to hydrologic behavior and to quantify the skill of predicting hydrologic response based on the combination of climate and catchment characteristics. Here we present results using an alternative approach that uses our current level of hydrological understanding, expressed in the form of a process-based model, to interrogate how climate and catchment characteristics interact to produce observed hydrologic response. The model uses topographic, geomorphologic, soil and vegetation information at the catchment scale and conditions parameter values using readily available data on precipitation, temperature and streamflow. It is applicable to a wide range of catchments in different climate settings. We have developed a step-by-step procedure to analyze the observed hydrologic response and to assign parameter values related to specific components of the model. We applied this procedure to 12 catchments across a climate gradient east of the Rocky Mountains, USA. We show that the model is capable of reproducing the observed hydrologic behavior measured through hydrologic signatures chosen at different temporal scales. Next, we analyze the dominant time scales of catchment response and their dimensionless ratios with respect to climate and observable landscape features in an attempt to explain hydrologic partitioning. We find that only a limited number of model parameters can be related to observable landscape features. However, several climate-model time scales, and the associated dimensionless numbers, show scaling relationships with respect to the investigated hydrological signatures (runoff coefficient, baseflow index, and slope of the flow duration curve). Moreover, some dimensionless numbers vary systematically across the climate gradient, possibly as a result of systematic co-variation of climate, vegetation and soil related time scales. If such co-variation can be shown to be robust across many catchments along different climate gradients, it opens perspective for model parameterization in ungauged catchments as well as prediction of hydrologic response in a rapidly changing environment

Impacts of climate change on agricultural production in arid areas (ICCAP) -The possible effect of climatic changes on the irrigated agriculture of Seyhan Basin-

We present a new framework for modelling the complexities of food and water security under globalisation. The framework sets out a method to capture regional and sectoral interdependencies and cross-scale feedbacks within the global food system that contribute to emergent water use patterns. The framework integrates aspects of existing models and approaches in the fields of hydrology and integrated assessment modelling. The core of the framework is a multi-agent network of city agents connected by infrastructural trade networks. Agents receive socio-economic and environmental constraint information from integrated assessment models and hydrological models respectively and simulate complex, socio-environmental dynamics that operate within those constraints. The emergent changes in food and water resources are aggregated and fed back to the original models with minimal modification of the structure of those models. It is our conviction that the framework presented can form the basis for a new wave of decision tools that capture complex socio-environmental change within our globalised world. In doing so they will contribute to illuminating pathways towards a sustainable future for humans, ecosystems and the water they share

Advancing catchment hydrology to deal with predictions under change

Throughout its historical development, hydrology as an earth science, but especially as a problem-centred engineering discipline has largely relied (quite successfully) on the assumption of stationarity. This includes assuming time invariance of boundary conditions such as climate, system configurations such as land use, topography and morphology, and dynamics such as flow regimes and flood recurrence at different spatio-temporal aggregation scales. The justification for this assumption was often that when compared with the temporal, spatial, or topical extent of the questions posed to hydrology, such conditions could indeed be considered stationary, and therefore the neglect of certain long-term non-stationarities or feedback effects (even if they were known) would not introduce a large error. However, over time two closely related phenomena emerged that have increasingly reduced the general applicability of the stationarity concept: the first is the rapid and extensive global changes in many parts of the hydrological cycle, changing formerly stationary systems to transient ones. The second is that the questions posed to hydrology have become increasingly more complex, requiring the joint consideration of increasingly more (sub-) systems and their interactions across more and longer timescales, which limits the applicability of stationarity assumptions. Therefore, the applicability of hydrological concepts based on stationarity has diminished at the same rate as the complexity of the hydrological problems we are confronted with and the transient nature of the hydrological systems we are dealing with has increased. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss potentially helpful paradigms and theories that should be considered as we seek to better understand complex hydrological systems under change. For the sake of brevity we focus on catchment hydrology. We begin with a discussion of the general nature of explanation in hydrology and briefly review the history of catchment hydrology. We then propose and discuss several perspectives on catchments: as complex dynamical systems, self-organizing systems, co-evolving systems and open dissipative thermodynamic systems. We discuss the benefits of comparative hydrology and of taking an information-theoretic view of catchments, including the flow of information from data to models to predictions. In summary, we suggest that these perspectives deserve closer attention and that their synergistic combination can advance catchment hydrology to address questions of change

ERS International Congress 2022: highlights from the Respiratory Clinical Care and Physiology Assembly

It is a challenge to keep abreast of all the clinical and scientific advances in the field of respiratory medicine. This article contains an overview of the laboratory-based science, clinical trials and qualitative research that were presented during the 2022 European Respiratory Society International Congress within the sessions from the five groups of Assembly 1 (Respiratory Clinical Care and Physiology). Selected presentations are summarised from a wide range of topics: clinical problems, rehabilitation and chronic care, general practice and primary care, mobile/electronic health (m-health/e-health), clinical respiratory physiology, exercise and functional imaging