Storage, mixing and release of water at the catchment scale

森林水源为生活在北美的一半人和全世界数十亿人提供饮用水。此外，在过去十年中，森林水文界发现，储存的水及其通过集水区流向河流网络的时间可以在河流(质量和质量)排干林地的土地利用变化结果中发挥重要作用。但是，在过去的5年里，对树木、土壤、溪流和地下水中的水进行了新的同位素分析，结果表明，水的储存方式是以我们刚刚开始了解的方式进行的。因此，我的NSERC探索基金将在这种划分之后，通过研究一系列关键问题来研究森林集水区是如何储存、混合和释放水的：加拿大北方森林中的树木从哪里获得土壤水分，以及深度在整个水文年中是否发生变化？树木地上和地下的生理特性如何影响水源深度分布？在加拿大的成对分水岭地点，蓄水如何控制对森林处理的径流响应的巨大差异？不同的土壤水提取技术如何影响我们对水源、流动路径和传输时间的解释？我们能否定义一种新的基于年龄的集水平衡理论，明确表示地下水的储存、混合和释放？这些问题将通过一套四个相互关联的工作包来回答，总部基地、现场和实验室方法将在战略上保持一致。这项工作建立在我的团队在过去6年里发表在《自然》、《自然-地球科学》、《自然-可持续性》、《自然-气候变化》和《科学报告》上的有影响力的成果的基础上。这项工作涉及澳大利亚、中国和欧洲的几个关键战略合作伙伴；旨在提高研究影响力，将参与该计划的10个HQP联网，并帮助他们开始早期的科学生涯。拟议的研究计划有助于推进我的长期目标，即了解不同流域系统的径流产生过程，这将有助于对流域行为的分类和改进的模型公式。这一创新工作计划与联合国侧重于“可持续森林管理”的可持续发展目标15保持一致。协调这四个工作包是为了弥补我们实现可持续发展目标能力方面的主要差距。在国内，我们对森林水源集水区如何储存、混合和释放水的理解取得了进展，这一进展将被编织到新的加拿大范围内的全球水未来计划中，该计划由萨斯喀彻温省大学全球水安全研究所领导，与滑铁卢大学、麦克马斯特大学和威尔弗雷德·劳里埃大学合作，旨在更好地预测和管理气候和土地利用变化下加拿大未来的水资源。

Forested headwaters supply drinking water to half of the people living in North America and billions of people worldwide. And, in the past decade the forest hydrology community has found that stored water and the time it spends travelling through a catchment to the stream network can play a large role in landuse change outcomes in streams (quality and quality) draining forest land. But, in the past 5 years new isotope analysis of water from trees, soils, streams and groundwater has shown that water storage is compartmentalized in ways we are only just beginning to understand. Therefore, my NSERC Discovery Grant will go after this compartmentalization and investigate how forested catchments store, mix and release water by examining a set of key questions: Where do trees in the Canadian Boreal forest source their soil water and does the depth change throughout the hydrologic year? How do above and belowground physiological traits of trees affect water source depth distributions? How does water storage control the wide variance of streamflow responses to forest treatments at paired watershed sites across Canada? How do different soil water extraction techniques affect our interpretation of water sources, flow paths and transit times? Can we define a new age-based theory of the catchment water balance that explicitly represents storage, mixing and release of subsurface waters? These questions will be answered through a set of four interconnected Work Packages where HQP, field sites and laboratory methods will be strategically aligned. The work builds on influential accomplishments that my group has published in Nature, Nature-Geosciences, Nature-Sustainability, Nature-Climate Change and Scientific Reports over the past 6 years. The work engages several key strategic collaborators in Australia, China and Europe; designed to boost the research impact, network the 10 HQP involved in this proposal and help launch their early scientific careers. The proposed research program helps advance my long term goal of understanding runoff generation processes across diverse catchment systems, which will contribute to the classification of catchment behaviours and improved model formulations. This innovative work plan is aligned to the UN's Sustainable Development (SD) Goal 15 focused on `sustainable forest management'. The four Work Packages are coordinated to address key gaps in our ability to fulfil this SD goal. Closer to home, advances in our understanding of how forested headwater catchments store, mix and release water will be woven into the new Canada-Wide Global Water Futures program-led by the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan in partnership with the University of Waterloo, McMaster University and Wilfred Laurier University-for better prediction and management of Canada's future water resources under changing climate and landuse.