VeWa aims to increase the ability to predict the consequences of climate change on water resources
The type of extensive empirically-based site-comparisons that Doerthe and her team will be making have never before been conducted in high-latitude catchments. The team will deliver a comprehensive understanding of the critical role of vegetation in water partitioning and cycling in different ecohydrological units along an environmental gradient from the sub-boreal to sub-arctic. The team will look at how water is stored, how it travels, how it is released back into the system, and how long these processes take, as well as the implications this holds for climate change in high-latitude ecosystems. No one actually knows how well the current water models represent what is actually happening, which means that no one actually know whether the predictions of climate change due to water resources are actually correct.
- This interdisciplinary project is based upon understanding the ecohydrology of soil-vegetation assemblages (hydrotopes) along a climate gradient as a precursor to understand future response to change in high-latitude upland catchments.
- The overarching goal of this project is to understand the internal processes of water storage, transmission and release in high latitude catchments (cf. how vegetation water use is linked to soil water, groundwater and surface waters).
- The project will examine this ecohydrological coupling along representative landscape transects in four high-latitude experimental catchments located in four different terrestrial ecotones.
- It will also examine how water storage, transmission and release might be influenced by differences in seasonality and climatic variability in these distinct geographic regions.