Large‐Scale Journal Articles Addressing Pressing Issues

Abstract

The Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) publishes multidisciplinary water resources journal articles reporting research results across a wide range of spatial scales providing critical scientific information on diverse topics. Increasingly, water policy issues dealing with matters such as climate change and coastal eutrophication require a large-scale, integrated research to address these and other pressing problems. JAWRA has a strong tradition of publishing large-scale research articles. A few examples of the variety of large-scale journal articles follow. JAWRA has published numerous articles focused on the water quality of the Chesapeake Bay and its watershed. Recent articles include Linker et al. (2013) who computed atmospheric nutrient loads to the Chesapeake Bay watershed, Shenk and Linder (2013) who describe the development and application of the 2010 Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load model, and Weller and Baker (2014) who used statistical models to provide the first empirical estimates of riparian buffer effects on cropland nitrate export to streams throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The SPAtially Referenced Regression on Watershed attributes (SPARROW) models have been used to address the large-scale water quality issues across the United States (U.S.). Recently-published JAWRA journal articles examined the nitrogen and phosphorus export to the Gulf of Mexico (Robertson et al., 2014; McLellan et al., 2015a, b), dissolved solids in the Upper Colorado River (Keum and Kaluarachchi, 2015), and nitrogen (Saleh et al., 2015) and phosphorus (Domagalski and Saleh, 2015) sources and transport to California streams and rivers. JAWRA has published many other types of large-scale water quality or contaminant articles. For example, Flanagan Pritz et al. (2014) analyzed fish samples from remote water bodies in national parks in Alaska and the western U.S. for semivolatile organic compounds. White et al. (2015) used the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to develop nutrient and sediment export coefficients for land-use settings in ecoregions across the U.S. Stets et al. (2015) examined the long-term water quality monitoring data to evaluate the changes instream nitrate across the U.S. and to quantify the relationships of these changes to the land use and other factors. JAWRA articles also examine the large-scale hydrologic processes. Sanford and Selnick (2013) combined a water-balance approach with a climate and land-cover regression equation to estimate the actual evapotranspiration across the conterminous U.S. Patil et al. (2014) used a spatially lumped hydrologic model to predict the daily streamflow of watersheds across the state of Oregon and analyzed the model's performance using the statewide Oregon Hydrologic Landscape Classification (Wigington et al., 2013). Fleming and Barton (2015) conducted a 90-year trend analysis on the annual temperature, precipitation, and streamflow for three major river basins in the southern interior ecoprovince of British Columbia. Evaluation of projected hydrologic responses to climate change is another important topical area for JAWRA. Qiao et al. (2013) used Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment, streamflow, and groundwater data to reduce the parameter uncertainty for the application of SWAT to the lower Missouri River basin and then used the model (Qiao et al., 2014), along with climate scenarios, to estimate the changes in future streamflow quantity and variability. Using a physically based hydrologic model and an ensemble of statistically downscaled global climate model scenarios, Tohver et al. (2014) examined the projected changes of hydrologic extremes, such as floods and low flows, for numerous river locations in the Pacific Northwest. Johnson et al. (2015) used SWAT to model streamflow, total suspended solids, nitrogen, and phosphorus responses to climate and urban land use change scenarios in large watersheds across the U.S. Water resources issues needing to be addressed at a large spatial scale continue to grow. The number and diversity of JAWRA large-scale journal articles illustrates the commitment of the JAWRA to publish large-scale research. Please feel free to contact me ([email protected]) if you have questions regarding a potential large-scale journal article for JAWRA. Inquiries related to other topics are always welcome as well.