HR: 09:35h
AN: H41I-07 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Landscape response to climate forcing: a fully coupled Eco-Hydro-Geomorphic modeling approach
AU: * Istanbulluoglu, E
EM: erkan2@unl.edu
AF: Departments of Geosciences and Biological Systems Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 200 Bessey Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588 United States
AU: Bras, R
EM: rlbras@mit.edu
AF: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139 United States
AB: Investigating the linkages between physical and biological landscape processes is among the new challenges in geomorphology. Effects of vegetation on drainage density, landscape relief, shifts in spatial dominance of different erosion forms, and sediment yields are among the recent studies in this evolving research direction. These studies often employ a simple model for vegetation-erosion dynamics, in which vegetation growth is represented by a simple growth function, independent of climate and soil moisture. Recently, CHILD landscape evolution model is equipped with a simple ecohydrology model, relating vegetation growth to evapotranspiration. In this study, we use CHILD to investigate: (1) the effects of climate (humid, sub-humid, semi-arid) on some of the key topographic attributes, including slope-area scaling and drainage density, and (2) potential impacts of different climate change scenarios on long-term water balance, erosion rates, vegetation cover and landscape morphology. Our emphasis in the second part of the study is on the time lags between the response of different components of the landscape system as well as their interactions in enhancing and/or dumping each other's response to climate forcing. Our results demonstrate the dominant influence of vegetation on the landscape response, highlighting the urgent need for research in understanding the inherent coupling between vegetation dynamics, and physical basin hydrogeomorphic processes.
DE: 1625 Geomorphology and weathering (0790, 1824, 1825, 1826, 1886)
DE: 1804 Catchment
DE: 1805 Computational hydrology
DE: 1813 Eco-hydrology
DE: 1815 Erosion
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005