Abstract
Abstract. Experimental watersheds have a long tradition as research sites in hydrology and have been used since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU) recently extended its experimental research forest site “Rosalia” with an area of 950 ha towards the creation of a full ecological-hydrological experimental watershed. The overall objective is to implement a multi-scale, multi-disciplinary observation system that facilitates the study of water, energy and solute transport processes in the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum. This article describes the characteristics of the site and the monitoring network and its instrumentation that has been installed since 2015, as well as the datasets. The network includes four discharge gauging stations and seven rain gauges along with observations of air and water temperature, relative humidity, and electrical conductivity. In four profiles, soil water content and temperature are recorded at different depths. In addition, since 2018, nitrate, TOC and turbidity have been monitored at one gauging station. In 2019, a programme to collect isotopic data in precipitation and discharge was initiated. All data collected since 2015, including, in total, 56 high-resolution time series (with 10 min sampling intervals), are provided to the scientific community on a publicly accessible repository. The datasets are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3997140 (Fürst et al., 2020).
Highlights
Oriented water management depends on understanding hydrological processes and their dominant controls at different spatial and temporal scales
Hydrological processes driven by meteorological conditions are strongly controlled by complex feedback mechanisms with biotic and abiotic systems (Porporato and Rodriguez-Iturbe, 2002)
Hydrological experimental watersheds have gradually transitioned into multi-disciplinary experimental watersheds
Summary
Oriented water management depends on understanding hydrological processes and their dominant controls at different spatial and temporal scales. Rain-out shelters were used in parts of the forest by Netherer et al (2015) to investigate drought impacts on bark beetle attacks on Norway spruce, while Schwen et al (2015) and Leitner et al (2017) used rain-out shelters to investigate soil water repellency and short-term organic nitrogen fluxes under a changing climate Besides such local experiments, the monitoring network established in 2015 enables researchers to investigate the impacts on the large-scale forest ecosystem and its services by providing the necessary baseline data. The objective of this article is to present the monitoring network and the recorded data of the Rosalia watershed and to make them available to the scientific community
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