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Abstract
AbstractThe importance of conceptualizing the dynamics of storage‐driven saturation area connectivity in runoff generation has been central to the development of TOPMODEL and similar low parameterized rainfall–runoff models. In this contribution, we show how we developed a 40‐year hydrometric data base to simulate storage–discharge relationships in the Girnock catchment in the Scottish Highlands using a simple conceptual model. The catchment is a unique fisheries reference site where Atlantic salmon populations have been monitored since 1966. The modelling allowed us to track storage dynamics in hillslopes, the riparian zone and groundwater, and explicitly link non‐linear changes of streamflows to landscape storage and connectivity dynamics. This provides a fundamental basis for understanding how the landscape and riverscape are hydrologically connected and how this regulates in‐stream hydraulic conditions that directly influence salmonids. We use the model to simulate storage and discharge dynamics over the 40‐year period of fisheries records. The modelled storage‐driven connectivity provides an ecohydological context for understanding the dynamics in stream flow generation which determine habitat hydraulics for different life stages of salmon population. This new, long‐term modelling now sets this variability in the riverscape in a more fundamental context of the inter‐relationships between storage in the landscape and stream flow generation. This provides a simple, robust framework for future ecohydrological modelling at this site, which is an alternative to more increasingly popular but highly parameterized and uncertain commercial ecohydrological models. It also provides a wider, novel context that is a prerequisite for any model‐based scenario assessment of likely impacts resulting from climate or land use change. Copyright © 2016 The Authors Hydrological Processes Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Copyright © 2016 The Authors Hydrological Processes Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Highlights
The last decade has seen increased consideration of explicit quantification of water storage dynamics as well as water fluxes in both empirical and modelling studies in catchment hydrology (McNamara et al, 2011)
Many modelling studies have focused on capturing the short-term dynamic storage changes that lead to successful simulation of storm events and the nonlinearities of how rainfall–runoff transformations change
Such habitat assessment was mainly focused on instream hydraulics (Gore and Nestler, 1988), but the dependence of stream flows on catchment hydrological conditions is increasingly recognized, along with the importance of subtle non-linearities and hysteresis in storage–discharge relationships which may affect responses to environmental change (Capell et al, 2013)
Summary
The last decade has seen increased consideration of explicit quantification of water storage dynamics as well as water fluxes in both empirical and modelling studies in catchment hydrology (McNamara et al, 2011). It is well established that storage dynamics influence non-linear connectivity between landscape units in catchments and regulate stream flow generation (Tetzlaff et al, 2014) Such concepts have been usefully embedded in the original TOPMODEL approach (Beven and Kirkby, 1979) and other well-known conceptual models such as HBV (Seibert and Vis, 2012). Appropriate hydrological models can simulate stream flow on the basis of distributed storage-driven connectivity dynamics that link the landscape to the response of the stream channel network (Nippgen et al, 2015) Such model applications are increasingly incorporated in integrated ecohydrological assessment to understand how catchment-scale environmental change (e.g. climate or land cover change) might affect river flow regimes and in-stream aquatic habitats For many purposes it can be advantageous to use simpler conceptual runoff models in such ecohydrological investigations that have identifiable parameters and constrained uncertainty, but still capture the dominant hydrological connections between landscape and riverscape that regulate in-stream flows and habitat hydraulics (Weins, 2002)
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