WESS: an interdisciplinary approach to catchment research

Abstract

To meet these challenges, a number of novel research programs and networks focusing on entire catchments or landscapes have recently been established such as CUASHI (Toran and Hooper 2004) or TERENO (Zacharias et al. 2011). ‘‘Catchment Research’’ is the second Topical Issue (TI) in Environmental Earth Sciences with a focus on international hydrological research. Most of the material has been provided by the Water Earth System Science Competence Cluster (WESS) founded by the Universities of Tubingen, Stuttgart, and Hohenheim together with the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, UFZ (Grathwohl et al. 2013). The TI ‘‘Catchment Research’’ is a follow-up of the IWAS issue (Kalbus et al. 2012) which was dealing with Integrated Water Resources Management in different climate-hydrological sensitive areas in the world. ‘‘Catchment Research’’ is organized in three sections, starting with results from the initial period of the WESS project, followed by invited studies from catchment research in Europe, Asia and South America. The last part of the volume presents overview and technical papers on the development of terrestrial observatories, in particular, the TERENO network. A ‘‘News and Views’’ contribution concerning the networking and community efforts of the Water Science Alliance initiative is provided at the end of this issue (Krueger and Teutsch 2013). The first section of ‘‘Catchment Research’’ consists of contributions from the Water Earth System Science Competence Cluster. Grathwohl et al. (2013) provide a comprehensive overview of the WESS research concept and field sites. Studies presented put emphasis on experimental investigations in various sub-catchments of the Neckar River basin, e.g., using fluorometry (Lemke et al. 2013), assessing hyporheic exchange processes (Osenbruck et al. 2013), and delineating subsurface heterogeneity underneath the river bed (Doro et al. 2013). David et al. (2013) are investigating the influence of sewer overflows to accumulation patterns in river bed sediments. The second Editorial to the EES Topical Issue ‘‘Catchment Research’’.