Landscape heterogeneity and hydrological processes: a review of landscape-based hydrological models

Introduction

Landscapes and water are closely linked. Water shapes landscapes, and landscape heterogeneity in turn determines water storage, partitioning, and movement. Understanding hydrological processes from an ecological perspective is an exciting and fast-growing field of research.

Objectives

The motivation of this paper is to review advances in the interaction between landscape heterogeneity and hydrological processes, and propose a framework for synthesizing and moving forward.

Methods

Landscape heterogeneity, mainly topography and land cover, has been widely incorporated into existing hydrological models, but not in a systematic way. Topography, as one of the most important landscape traits, has been extensively used in hydrological models, but mostly to drive water flow downhill. Land cover heterogeneity, represented mostly by vegetation, is usually linked with evaporation and transpiration rather than runoff generation. Moreover, the proportion of different land cover types is usually the only index involved in hydrological models, leaving the influence of vegetation patterns and structure on hydrologic connectivity still largely unexplored. Additionally, moving from “what heterogeneity exists” to “why-type” questions probably offers us new insights into the nexus of landscape and water.

Conclusions

We believe that the principles of self-organization and co-evolution of landscape features shed light on the possibility to infer subsurface heterogeneity from a few observable landscapes, allowing us to simplify complexity to a few quantifiable metrics, and utilizing these metrics in models with sufficient heterogeneity but limited complexity. Landscape-based models can also be beneficial to improve our ability of prediction in ungauged basins and prediction in a changing environment (Panta Rhei, everything flows).

     

Landscape ecological concepts in planning: review of recent developments

Landscape Ecology - Landscape ecology as an interdisciplinary science has great potential to inform landscape planning, an integrated, collaborative practice on a regional scale. It is commonly...     

Seismic Cutlines,Changing Landscape Metrics and Grizzly Bear Landscape use in Alberta

Besides providing habitat to the grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) and other wildlife, the Rocky Mountain foothills of Alberta, Canada hosts considerable mining, seismic oil and gas exploration and production, and forest harvesting activities. Worldwide, such human activities influence the configuration and composition of the landscape. We assessed seismic cutline effects on landscape structure and grizzly bear use during early summer of 1999 and 2000. We studied five female and two male bears, which were GPS-collared in the spring following den emergence. The area available to this population was stratified into 49 km² hexagon-shaped sub-landscapes. The scale of this stratification was determined by patterns of bear movement. Fourteen compositional and configurational landscape metrics were calculated within each landscape unit, and bear use points were pooled or ‘binned’ within each unit. Landscape use was related to landscape metrics using a Generalized Linear Model (GLM). We found that seismic cutline proportion did not explain landscape use by grizzly bears; however secondary effects of cutlines on landscape structure did. Declining use was mainly associated with increasing proportions of closed forest, and increasing variation of inter-patch distances, while use was mainly increasing with increasing mean patch size. An earlier investigation had demonstrated that adding seismic cutlines to grizzly bear habitat caused increases in the variation of inter-patch distances. Since the landscape structure of this grizzly bear population will continue to change as a function of increased levels of resource extraction activities in the near future, it is crucial to further study the detailed meaning of landscape structure at the large and small scale for effective conservation efforts.