Storage, mixing and release of water at the catchment scale

森林覆盖的水源为北美一半的人口和全世界数十亿人提供饮用水。而且，在过去的十年中，森林水文学界发现，储存的水及其通过集水区到达河流网络所花费的时间可以在林地排水的河流（质量和质量）的土地利用变化结果中发挥重要作用。但是，过去五年对树木、土壤、溪流和地下水的水进行的新同位素分析表明，水储存的划分方式我们才刚刚开始了解。因此，我的 NSERC 发现补助金将进行这种划分，并通过检查一系列关键问题来研究森林集水区如何储存、混合和释放水：加拿大北方森林中的树木从哪里获取土壤水，以及在整个水文年中深度是否变化？树木的地上和地下生理特性如何影响水源深度分布？蓄水如何控制加拿大各地成对流域地点的森林处理对水流响应的巨大差异？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流域水平衡理论，明确代表地下水的储存、混合和释放？ 这些问题将通过一组四个相互关联的工作包来回答，其中总部、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过去六年在《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》上发表的有影响力的成就的基础上。这项工作涉及澳大利亚、中国和欧洲的几个重要战略合作伙伴；旨在提高研究影响力，将参与该提案的 10 位 HQP 联系起来，并帮助他们开启早期的科学职业生涯。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生成过程，这将有助于流域行为的分类和改进的模型公式。这项创新工作计划符合联合国可持续发展目标 15，重点是“可持续森林管理”。这四个工作包相互协调，以解决我们实现可持续发展目标的能力方面的关键差距。言归正传，我们对森林水源集水区如何储存、混合和释放水的理解的进步将被纳入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大学全球水安全研究所与滑铁卢大学、麦克马斯特大学和威尔弗雷德·劳里尔大学合作领导，以便在不断变化的气候和土地利用情况下更好地预测和管理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.