Catchments of the Future North: Towards Science for Management in the 21st Century
The workshop was held in Potsdam, Germany, during the week of 21st May - 25th May 2012.
The overall aim of North-Watch is to better understand the integrated consequences of climate change on the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of water resources across northern regions. To do this we want to bring together leading, cognate researchers working at long-term experimental catchments in different parts of the northern region comprising sensitive boreal, sub-arctic and sub-alpine environments. The purpose is to facilitate inter-catchment comparisons that will synthesize a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and regional understanding of the recent effects of climatic change and provide a stronger scientific basis for predicting what further changes are likely to be. Our belief is that an examination of a range of sites across a climatic transect in the northern zone will give a much stronger regional perspective on the responses to climatic change than any individual studies alone would do.
During the workshop, we focussed the presentations and discussions around three major themes:
- Learning from the past
- Towards a comparative ecohydrology of northern catchments: structure, functioning and sensitivity
- Projecting the non-stationary future: insights from catchment inter-comparisons
Introduction
- Doerthe Tetzlaff: Northern Watershed Ecosystem Response to Climate Change (North-Watch) - Towards a comparative ecohydrology of northern catchments
Invited Speaker Presentations
- Jim Kirchner: Stream chemistry dynamics on timescales from hours to decades, and their implications for catchment processes
- Gordon Grant: A geological framework for interpreting effects of climate warming on streamflow in Western U.S. watersheds: what can the past tell us about the future?
- Ann-Kristin Bergström: Climate induced changes in catchments – effects on productivity and biostructure of unproductive northern lakes
- Allan Rohde: Streamflow generation in Nordic till soils. What do we know and what do we guess?
- Rick Cunjak: The complex interaction of ecology and hydrology in a small catchment: a salmon’s perspective
- James McNamara: On the co-evolution of landscape pattern and hydrologic process
- Diane McKnight: Impacts of Acid Mine Drainage on Stream Ecosystems in the Colorado Rockies under a Changing Hydrologic Regime
- Christina Tague: Towards a comparative ecohydrology of northern catchments: structure, functioning and sensitivity
- Nikolai Friberg: Changing Northern catchments: Is altered hydrology, temperature or both going to shape future stream communities and ecosystem processes?
- John M. Buffington: Understanding potential effects of climate change on streambed scour and risks to salmonid survival in mountain basins
- Richard Essery: Insights from intercomparisons with a large ensemble of snow models
- Jim Freer: Understanding the main uncertainties in hydrological ensembles of future climate change predictions
- Irena Creed: Discriminating between stationary and non-stationary responses in catchment water and solute yields using wavelet analysis
- Myron Mitchell: Regulation of sulfur budgets of forest watersheds in the northeastern United States with an Emphasis on the Adirondack Mountains of New York State: Shift from Atmospheric Regulation to Climatic Control
- Klement Tockner Synthesis and discussion
Participants
- Ann-Kristin Bergstroem (Umeå Universitet, Sweden)
- John Buffington (USDA Forest Service Science, Boise, US)
- Jim Buttle (Trent University, Canada)
- Sean Carey (McMaster University, Canada)
- Irena Creed (University of Western Ontario, Canada)
- Rick Cunjak (University New Brunswick, Canada)
- Richard Essery (University of Edinburgh, UK)
- Jim Freer (University of Bristol, UK)
- Nikolai Friberg (Aarhus University, Denmark)
- Gordon Grant (USDA Forest Service and Oregon State University, US)
- Jim Kirchner (Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL) and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Switzerland)
- Hjalmar Laudon (SLU, Umeå, Sweden)
- Jeff McDonnell (Oregon State University, US)
- Kevin McGuire (Virginia Tech, US)
- Diane Mcknight (University of Colorado, US)
- Jim McNamara (Boise State University, US)
- Myron Mitchell (SUNY, US)
- Allan Rohde (University of Uppsala, Sweden)
- Jan Seibert (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
- Jamie Shanley (U.S. Geological Survey, Montpelier, US)
- Chris Soulsby (University of Aberdeen, UK)
- Christina Tague (University of California, US)
- Doerthe Tetzlaff (University of Aberdeen, UK)
- Klement Tockner (Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Germany)