Hydrologic recovery in forest landscapes

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Land use change can pose serious challenges for sustainable water resource management, which in turn requires information on the time needed for various hydrologic components to return to their original condition after disturbance (hydrologic recovery). I propose a combined experimental-modelling approach to examine hydrologic recovery in a managed forest landscape in southern Ontario (the Ganaraska Forest) on the crest of the Oak Ridges Moraine, a key hydrogeologic feature of the region. I seek to understand how hydrologic properties and processes differ between dominant land covers, and establish how they change with hydrologic recovery in the context of a changing climate in this region. The Forest provides a mosaic of agricultural land and forest stands of differing type and age on similar soils and surficial geologic deposits under the same climate that facilitates the study of how the landscape's key hydrologic components change with forest age (a surrogate of hydrologic recovery). Water storage and fluxes (e.g. interception, surface runoff, recharge) will be examined for non-forested areas and forest stands of differing type and age. Alternative approaches to estimating recharge will be assessed to establish their potential for providing cost-effective and spatially-distributed recharge estimates for the Oak Ridges Moraine as well as other critical groundwater recharge areas in Canada. The field program will provide data to parameterize and test models of water infiltration, storage and recharge that will be run under different climatic conditions to examine interactions between land cover, climate, topography, soils and hydrogeology in controlling hydrologic recovery in this landscape. This work will provide an integrated field and modelling-based study of the hydrologic recovery of forest landscapes that addresses all aspects of the forest water balance over long time scales. The resulting information and recharge estimation tools will assist water resource management on the Oak Ridges Moraine as well as in other forest landscapes in Canada currently experiencing natural and human-induced impacts.