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Moving beyond heterogeneity and process complexity: A new vision for watershed hydrology
Water Resources Section, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
Department of Geography and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA
Institute for Landscape Ecology and Resources Management, University of Gießen, Gießen, Germany
Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen, UK
United States Forest Service, Corvallis, Oregon, USA
Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA
School of Earth and Geographical Sciences, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrological Sciences, Inc., Washington, D. C., USA
Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA
Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA
Department of Forest Resources Management and Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Field studies in watershed hydrology continue to characterize and catalogue the enormous heterogeneity and complexity of rainfall runoff processes in more and more watersheds, in different hydroclimatic regimes, and at different scales. Nevertheless, the ability to generalize these findings to ungauged regions remains out of reach. In spite of their apparent physical basis and complexity, the current generation of detailed models is process weak. Their representations of the internal states and process dynamics are still at odds with many experimental findings. In order to make continued progress in watershed hydrology and to bring greater coherence to the science, we need to move beyond the status quo of having to explicitly characterize or prescribe landscape heterogeneity in our (highly calibrated) models and in this way reproduce process complexity and instead explore the set of organizing principles that might underlie the heterogeneity and complexity. This commentary addresses a number of related new avenues for research in watershed science, including the use of comparative analysis, classification, optimality principles, and network theory, all with the intent of defining, understanding, and predicting watershed function and enunciating important watershed functional traits.
Received 28 August 2006; accepted 15 March 2007; published 26 July 2007.
Citation: (2007), Moving beyond heterogeneity and process complexity: A new vision for watershed hydrology, Water Resour. Res., 43, W07301, doi:10.1029/2006WR005467.
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