[Seminar] Prof. Taehee Hwang

Linking vegetation dynamics with watershed-scale hydrologic behavior

Forested watersheds provide important ecosystem services through the provision of high quality freshwater, mitigation of floods, and maintenance of base flows. Therefore, it is important to understand how watershed-scale hydrologic behavior will be altered by forest responses under ongoing climate change. We investigated the impact of climate-induced vegetation dynamics, such as longer growing season and infestation, on long- or short-term non-stationary hydrologic behavior across the eastern US. Within a distributed hydrological modeling framework, we combine multi-temporal remote sensing data and field observations to separate the net effect of vegetation dynamics on emergent hydrologic behavior at the watershed scale. Our study indicates that non-stationary hydrologic behavior at the forested watersheds has been closely mediated by seasonal and structural forest canopy responses to climate variables rather than directly driven by climatic variables. This talk would emphasize the importance of understanding the ecosystem responses to ongoing climate change for predictions of future freshwater regimes.