Forests and Water
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Research Theme: Forest Water Use and Streamflow Dynamics
Water yield from forest environments represents the greatest contribution to streamflow in the major river systems in southern Australia. At present, there is a major impetus to account for changes in streamflow from land use changes such as forestry practices, fire and changing climatic patterns. The forest and water research group have major projects that are integrating ground-based and remotely-sensed technologies to identify the key drivers of water yield across a variety of forested environments. Our comprehensive monitoring projects involve quantifying catchment water balance from the leaf-level to the whole landscape scale. These investigations have formed the basis of modelling efforts that will provide realistic simulations of forest water use and resulting streamflow by addressing issues such as fire recovery, changes in rainfall timing, magnitude and soil water storage and catchment scale variability in vegetation structure.
Current projects
- Intra-annual hydrological responses to climate variation in native mixed-forest catchments.
- Long term water use of mountain ash and the efficiency of heavily forested catchments
- Modelling the long-term impacts of forest disturbance, wildfires and climate change on catchment streamflow
- East Kiewa study – Dynamics of runoff, sediment and nutrient fluxes from burnt forested catchments
- Plantations and water resource management
- Post wildfire changes to plant morphology and physiology: implications for water yield in wet eucalypt forests
- Predicting the effects of plantations on catchment water balances
- Prediction of the Long Term Impact of Thinning on Water Yield
- Regionalising forest water use with forest growth models
- Response of mixed species eucalypt forests to patchy burns: plant water use and hydraulic architecture
- Water use of mixed species eucalypt forests
- Analysis of Coranderrk data to 2007
- Paired catchment research in Australian forest hydrology
- Virtual water content of wood.
- The impact of burning of the Croppers Creek catchments in 2006.
- Explanation of Croppers Creek hydrographs in terms of the Boussinesq equation formulation of Troch and Paniconi.
- The growth in area of Melbourne’s water catchments in relation to Melbourne’s population growth, and future expansion of Melbourne’s forested catchments is they were to be major suppliers.
- The growth of knowledge of Eucalyptus regnans hydrology
- Comparison of Eucalyptus regnans regrowth water use with other regrowth water use as determined by paired catchment projects around the world