Ecohydrology

When the substrate for ecological interactions is the river network, the emerging universality of form is reflected in its function as ecological corridor, with implications.

Earth system model projections of vegetation–climate feedback frequently depend on inaccurate values of evaporation sensitivity to vegetation changes, potentially resulting in misleading conclusions. A promising avenue involves improving the transpiration partitioning parameterizations and incorporating groundwater connections to refine the modelled sensitivity.

Research on the ecological impacts of drought has predominantly focused on the scarcity of water supply, often overlooking divergent ecosystem water demands across vegetation types, regions, and time. These diverse ecosystem water demands need to be incorporated into an effective ecological drought monitoring and assessment framework.

Rivers carry large quantities of carbon and form an important link between terrestrial, marine and atmospheric biogeochemical cycles, yet our observations of river carbon are severely limited. Here we provide a blueprint to build a global River Observation System that would improve our ability to observe and predict changes in this crucial piece of the global carbon cycle.

This Review highlights the strengths and limitations of deep learning approaches relative to traditional approaches, emphasizing their potential as a currently underutilized yet promising avenue for advancing our understanding of water-quality sciences.

Large-scale afforestation is championed as a way to restore degraded habitats, conserve biodiversity and advance societal improvements. In the Middle East, a severely water-stressed region, we argue that urban greening will need to play a major part in efforts to deliver a more sustainable and water-sensitive strategy, while also enhancing urban liveability.

Due to technological, economic and environmental constraints, contemporary treatment plants cannot treat all wastewater. In particular, the very high amount of agricultural and urban runoff to be treated is increasingly concerning, especially with more erratic — and unpredictable — rainfall events. Passive ecosystem services can be combined with engineered processes to create hybrid, locally adapted, inexpensive and sustainable technologies to more feasibly treat runoff and wastewater globally.

Climate change and other human activities are modifying river water temperature globally. A more holistic understanding of river temperature dynamics in an integrated climate–land–hydrology–human framework is urgently needed for sustainable river management and adaptation strategies.

Bridging the gap between hydrology and ecology, ecohydrology recognizes that water resources cannot be studied in isolation from ecosystems.

The use of widely available groundwater and remote sensing data allows the identification of depth to groundwater thresholds to maintain water-dependent vegetation health.

Climate model simulations and aridity indices suggest decreasing summertime surface soil moisture in the continental USA due to anthropogenic climate change, but observations from 2011 to 2020 reveal positive trends across 57% of the region. Using a two-layer land surface model, this study attributes short-term soil moisture changes mainly to internal precipitation variability, and long-term trends to uncertain precipitation alterations.

Concentrations of dissolved oxygen are considered as comparably driven by light, temperature and flow regimes in individual rivers, although their continental-scale drivers remain elusive due to data scarcity. Results from data and a long short-term memory deep learning model suggests that temperature is the most predominant driver of daily DO in US rivers.

Increases in lake surface water temperature could threaten lacustrine ecosystems. This study explores the widespread temperature increases in 92,245 lakes across the globe, showing that less than half of the lake warming is due to surface air temperature change and that accelerated evaporation causes slower lake warming compared with surface air temperature.

Exceptional streamflow and soil moisture conditions now occur on a substantial share of global land area and are much more frequent than in pre-industrial times. This marks a notable transgression of the new planetary boundary for freshwater change.

Surface conductance variations in non-vegetated salt flats are similar to those in vegetated ecosystems and in an idealized boundary layer model. This suggests that soil moisture, and not vapour pressure deficit, controls surface conductance variations.

Assessing the accuracy of evapotranspiration (ET) data is crucial for managing the water used by crops and natural vegetation. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of the accuracy of a remotely sensed ET model ensemble from the OpenET system using in situ ET measurements collected across the contiguous United States.

Harmful algal blooms threaten water resources across the globe. This study quantifies how temperature affects the occurrence and concentration of microcystin in lakes across the United States and finds that regions with temperatures that promote high microcystin concentrations will shift to higher latitudes in the coming decades.

It is critical to understand different drivers of regional hydroclimate change and to reduce uncertainty in future projections. This study disentangles the effects of CO₂ physiology and deforestation on projected precipitation, surface relative humidity and air temperature in Amazonia using multiple Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 experiments.

This research reveals a previously unrecognized yet potentially widespread biological pathway of methylmercury detoxification, which may exert important controls on the net production and bioaccumulation of the methylmercury toxin in aquatic food webs.

Based on case-specific operating parameters of each municipal wastewater treatment plant and the associated sewers and sludge disposal utilities, this study presents a detailed analysis of the current carbon footprint of the wastewater sector in China and scenarios for reducing future emissions.

This study demonstrates the evaluation of groundwater-dependent vegetation responses to changes in the depth to groundwater based on satellite-derived normalized difference vegetation index, a simple and practical approach that supports water and conservation management.