Water Supply Patterns Research Articles

Studying the water crisis in Delhi due to rapid urbanisation and land use transformation

ABSTRACT The paper records the spatial dynamics and water consumption pattern through statistical and spatial evidence. The objective of this paper is to analyse the impact of land use land cover change on water demand and supply pattern of a rapidly growing urban region. The research analyses data from Census report, local governments and spatial data from remotely sensed images. The research finds rapid transformation of open land to the built-up area, particularly in the North-West, North, North-East, South-West and South districts. Inequality of water supply volume and supply pattern varies greatly between the districts. The city continues to experience water crisis such as water deficiency during the peak summer, groundwater degradation, water accessibility of slums and informal settlements. The findings will help the policymakers to comprehend the water crisis and consider appropriate mitigation strategies.

PATTERN OF WATER SUPPLY IN RELATION TO DIFFERENT WATER SOURCES IN METROPOLITAN KANO

The study carried out on pattern of water supply in relation to different water sources in metropolitan Kano was aimed to assess the pattern of water supply in the area. Eight local government areas were found in the area but six local government areas were selected in conducting the research work. The selected local government areas included dala, Fagge, Kano Municipal, Gwale, Tarauni, Nassarawa. The research work was conducted through the following methods of data collection, (questionnaire and interview). Krecjie and morgan sampling techniques was adopted in administering the questionnaire, because it was the best sampling techniques that suited the study. The result of the findings indicated that ground water sources are now the major sources of water used in the study area, pipe borne water was generally inadequate. Dala, Kano Municipal, Fagge and Gwale were the areas mostly affected with scarcity of pipe borne water. Other sources of water for household usage included water from vendors and water supply Tankers. Some sources of water were founded inactive (that is sources of water producing less or no water due to some problems). Most people in the area depend on sachet water as their source of drinking water. Finally, in order to overcome some of the problems of water is their source of drinking water. Finally, in order to overcome some of the problems of water supply it was recommended that there should be alternative sources of power, regular maintenance, train of manpower, and effective management of water supply systems.

Evaluation of G × E × M Interactions to Increase Harvest Index and Yield of Early Sown Wheat.

Harvest index (HI) is the ratio of grain to total shoot dry matter and is as a measure of reproductive efficiency. HI is determined by interactions between genotypes (G), environment (E), and crop management (M). Historic genetic yield gains due to breeding in wheat have largely been achieved by increasing HI. Environmental factors are important for HI and include seasonal pattern of water supply and extreme temperatures during crop reproductive development. Wheat production in Australia has been dominated by fast-developing spring cultivars that when sown in late-autumn will flower at an optimal time in early spring. Water limited potential yield can be increased by sowing slower developing wheats with a vernalization requirement (winter wheat) earlier than currently practiced such that their development is matched to environment and they flower at the optimal time. This means a longer vegetative phase which increases rooting depth, proportion of water-use transpired, and transpiration efficiency by allowing more growth during winter when vapour pressure deficit is low. All these factors can increase biomass accumulation, grain number and thus grain yield potential. However higher yields are not always realized due to a lower HI of early sown slow developing wheats compared to fast developing wheats sown later. Here, we evaluate genotype × management practices to improve HI and yield in early sown slow developing wheat crops using 6 field experiments conducted across south eastern Australia from 2014 to 2018 in yield environments ranging from ~1 to ~4.7 t/ha. Practices included low plant densities (30–50 plants/m²), mechanical defoliation, and deferred application of nitrogen fertilizer. Lower plant densities had similar yield and HI to higher plant densities. Defoliation tended to increase HI but reduce yield except when there was severe stem frost damage. Deferring nitrogen had a variable effect depending on starting soil N and in crop rainfall. All management strategies evaluated gave variable HI and yield responses with small effect sizes, and we conclude that none of them can reliably increase HI in early sown wheat. We propose that genetic improvement is the most promising avenue for increasing HI and yield in early sown wheat, and postulate that this could be achieved more rapidly through early generation screening for HI in slow developing genotypes than by crop management.

Constructing dataset of classified drainage areas based on surface water-supply patterns in High Mountain Asia

ABSTRACT The High Mountain Asia (HMA) region, ranging from the Hindu Kush and Tien Shan in the west to the Himalaya in the south with an altitude between 2000 and 8844 m, holds the largest reservoir of glaciers and snow outside Earth Polar Regions. In the last decades, numerous glaciers and lake areas there have undergone tremendous changes with water redistribution. In order to increase understanding of the pattern of distribution of water resources, and their dynamic changes at the basin scale, a watershed classification based on the water replenishment patterns dataset was constructed. The input dataset are from the Randolph Glacier Inventory V.6.0 and the vector data of rivers and streams. Four datasets were thus obtained: Glacier-fed and Runoff-fed Drainage Area (GRDA), Glacier-fed and Runoff-free Drainage Area (GDA), Glacier-free and Runoff-fed Drainage Area (RDA), and the Glacier-free and Runoff-free Drainage Area (NGRDA), and the numbers of these four types of basins are 87, 107, 32, and 448 separately. The statistical results show GRDA has the largest surface area, accounting for 82.2% of the total basin area in HMA, mainly in the region of the basin with outflow rivers or streams. Dominated by small basins, the GDA area accounts for the smallest area, only 3.86% and the RDA accounts for 5.62%. For NGRDA, most are with small areas, accounting for 8.32%, and mainly distributes in the closed basin of the Qiangtang Plateau. This dataset provides a fundamental classified data source for research on water resources, climate, ecology, and environment in HMA. The published data are available at https://data.4tu.nl/download/uuid:d07d748f-d10b-4308-9626-199ef05cc9af/ and http://www.dx.doi.org/10.11922/sciencedb.923.

Using saline or brackish aquifers as reservoirs for thermal energy storage, with example calculations for direct-use heating in the Portland Basin, Oregon, USA

Tools to evaluate reservoir thermal energy storage (RTES; heat storage in slow-moving or stagnant geochemically evolved permeable zones in strata that underlie well-connected regional aquifers) are developed and applied to the Columbia River Basalt Group (CRBG) beneath the Portland Basin, Oregon, USA. The performance of RTES for heat storage and recovery in the Portland Basin is strongly dependent on the operational schedule of heat injection and extraction. We examined the effects of the operational schedule, based on an annual solar hot water supply pattern and a building heating demand model, using heat and fluid flow simulations with SUTRA. We show RTES to be feasible for supply of heating energy for a large combined research/teaching building on the Oregon Health and Science University South Waterfront expansion, an area of planned future development. Initially, heat is consumed to increase the reservoir temperature, and conductive heat loss is high due to high temperature gradients between the reservoir and surrounding rock. Conductive heat loss continues into the future, but the rate of heat loss decreases, and heat recovery efficiency of the RTES system increases over time. Simulations demonstrate the effects of varying heat-delivery rate and temperature on the heat production history of the reservoir. If 100% of building heating needs are to be supplied by combined solar/RTES, then the solar system must be sized to meet building needs plus long-term thermal losses (i.e., conductive losses once the system is heated to pseudo-steady state) from the RTES system. If the solar heating system barely meets these criteria, then during early years, less than 100% of the building demand will be supplied until the reservoir is fully-heated. The duration of supplying less than 100% of building demand can be greatly shortened by pre-heating the reservoir before building heating operations or by adding extra heat from external sources during early years. Analytic solutions are developed to evaluate efficacy and to help design RTES systems (e.g., well-spacing, thermal source sizing, etc.). A map of thermal energy storage capacity is produced for the CRBG beneath the Portland Basin. The simulated building has an annual heat load of ∼1.9 GWh, and the total annual storage capacity of the Portland Basin is estimated to be 43,400 GWh assuming seasonal storage of heat yields water from which 10 °C can be extracted via heat exchange, indicating a tremendous heating capacity of the CRBG.

Urban Multi-Source Water Supply in China: Variation Tendency, Modeling Methods and Challenges

Urban water resources are the basis for the formation and development of cities and the source of urban water supply. However, with the acceleration of urbanization and the explosion of urban populations, the contradiction between water supply and demand in some areas, especially in big cities, has become increasingly prominent. It is simply not sufficient to rely on local conventional water resources to meet urban water demand, and a single source water supply mode has a higher vulnerability, resulting in greater safety risks in urban or regional water supply systems. Therefore, giving full play to the water supply capacity and carrying out multi-source water supplies are necessary and urgent. This paper gives an overview of the optimal allocation of multi-source for urban water supply concerning variation tendency, modeling methods and facing challenges. Based on the variation tendency of water consumption and water supply pattern in China, Tianjin is taken as a typical city for systematically outlining water supply changes and cause analysis. Subsequently, the modeling methods for proposing the optimal allocation scheme are summarized, which are composed of defining the topological relation, constructing the mathematical model and seeking the optimal solution. Ultimately, the current and emerging challenges are discussed including emergency operation of multi-source water supply and joint operation of water quality and quantity. These summaries and prospects provide a valuable reference for giving full play to the multi-source water supply capacity and carrying out relevant research so as to propose the optimal allocation scheme in urban multi-source water supply systems.

Can complementary preferential flow and non-preferential flow domains contribute to soil water supply for rubber plantation?

Preferential flow has always been hotspot of research regarding soil water flow, biological activity, and carbon and nitrogen dynamics. However, the mechanism of water flow exchange between two adjacent zones (with and without root system) and the pattern of soil water supply for rubber are still unclear. In the present study, we considered two plots experiencing similar farming history: in the first plot we measured soil physical properties and soil volumetric water content (VWC) during rainfall, and the second plot was used to visualise water flow path and to measure root biomass. Besides, a model was developed on preferential flow domain (PFD, matching the root zone) and on non-preferential flow domain (NPFD, matching the remote root zone) to compute differences in soil properties between the PFD and NPFD. The results revealed that the dominant flow type in the PFD was preferential flow and the one in the NPFD was capillary flow. Dye stained area and wetting front rate negatively correlated with bulk density, while they positively correlated to non-capillary porosity and root biomass. Accordingly, PFD showed a quick response to rainfall. Indeed, during the rain, a lateral flow (driven by water gravity and pressure head gradient) predominantly carried water (0.95, 0.27, and 0.44 cm3 cm−3 for various rainfall events 1, 2, and 3, respectively) from PFD to NPFD. During the soil drainage stage, the lateral flow direction changed, and water (about 0.63, 0.30, and 0.39 cm3 cm−3 for rainfall events 1, 2, and 3, respectively) flowed from NPFD to PFD. As a result, PFD presented low storage and high flow characteristics compared with NPFD, suggesting this complementary relationship for water interaction between the two domains could be beneficial for rubber plants growth and development.

A novel Master–Slave optimization algorithm for generating an optimal release policy in case of reservoir operation

Dams and reservoirs provide decision-makers and managers with appropriate control on the available water resources, allowing the implementation of various strategies for the most efficient usage of the available water resources. In areas where water supply exhibits significant temporal variation when compared with the demand, the challenge is to bridge the gap and achieve an optimal match between the water supply and demand patterns. Therefore, the release of water from reservoirs should be controlled to ensure that the operation rule for the available water storage in the reservoir is optimized to satisfy the future water demands. This level of optimal control can only be achieved using an efficient optimization algorithm to optimally derive the operation rule for such a complex water system. Herein, two main methods have been considered to tackle this water resource management problem. First, three different optimization algorithms, namely particle swarm optimization, differential evolution, and whale optimization algorithm, have been applied. In addition, two different optimization algorithms, namely crow search algorithm and master–slave algorithm, have been introduced to generate an optimal rule for water release policy. Further, the proposed optimization algorithms have been applied to one of the most critical dam and reservoir water systems, namely the Aswan High Dam (AHD), which controls almost 95% of Egypt’s water resources. The current operation of AHD using the existing optimization rules resulted in a mismatch between the water supply and water demand. In other words, the water availability could be higher than the water demand during a certain period, whereas it could be less than the water demand during another period. The results denoted that the master–slave algorithm outperforms the remaining algorithms and generates an optimization rule that minimizes the mismatch between the water supply and water demand.

Effects of Temporal Heterogeneity of Water Supply and Spatial Heterogeneity of Soil Nutrients on the Growth and Intraspecific Competition of Bolboschoenus yagara Depend on Plant Density.

Clonal plants may face various types of resource heterogeneity in their natural habitats; as such, spatial or temporal resource heterogeneity can affect the growth of clonal plants. Clonal plants can concentrate their organs in a smaller area where resources are high would cause heterogeneity to increase competition between plants. Most studies on resource heterogeneity have investigated the response of plants under a single density or by manipulating a single resource. Few studies have tested the effects of the heterogeneous distribution of two covariable resources on plant growth and intraspecific competition. A greenhouse experiment was therefore conducted to study plant responses to the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the soil and water supply under a variety of plant densities (one, two, four, or six plants per container). The perennial clonal herb Bolboschoenus yagara was grown under different combinations of water supply patterns, soil nutrient distribution types and plant densities while maintaining the total water and soil nutrient availability per container constant. Compared with that at a relatively high plant density, soil nutrient heterogeneity resulted in significantly less total plant biomass and less-modified morphological traits when the plant density is relative low. At the highest plant density, compared with the homogeneous soil treatments, the heterogeneous soil treatments significantly increased the total biomass and R/S ratio. Water supply patterns also clearly affected plant morphological traits at the highest plant density. Furthermore, soil heterogeneity significantly increased intraspecific competition intensity at low plant densities, but did not significantly affect intraspecific competition intensity at higher plant densities. Water heterogeneity had little impact on intraspecific competition. These results suggest that the growth performance and intraspecific competition of B. yagara are more strongly affected by soil nutrient distribution rather than by water supply patterns and that competition for soil nutrients may increase plant sensitivity to soil heterogeneity.

Patterns of pipe-borne water supply in the Buea Municipality: Challenges and way forward

Abstract: A growing quest in the mind of man today is to establish a balance equation between his activities and the available freshwater. Trillion of dollars have been spent worldwide to reduce water shortages, but governments and stakeholders ubiquitously have failed to empower the city dwellers and to ambush the challenges to pipe borne water supply. In many parts of developing countries including Cameroon, population growth, urbanization and water demands are rising rapidly, whereas water availability, quality, reliability, frequency and distribution are decreasing rapidly due to planning deficiencies, inefficient management and deterioration. This study aimed at examining the patterns of pipe borne water supply in the Buea Municipality, challenges and municipal response. A sample size of 120 inhabitants was taken to represent the entire population in the study area. Simple random sampling technique was then used to identify the most appropriate respondents and locations. Findings were analyzed using Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS), Microsoft excel and represented in the form of tables and figures. Findings revealed that, there is limited water supply reliability, access and distribution in the Buea Municipality attributed to physical and anthropological influences such as inadequate water supply, degradation and poor water management by the municipal authorities. The study look forward to giving recommendations of the use of water storage devices such as water tanks as a short term strategy and the extension of pipes distribution lines to be in direct proportion with population growth among others.

Spatio-temporal supply–demand of surface water for agroforestry planning in saline landscape of the lower Amudarya Basin

Global warming is predicted to increase water scarcity in many drylands worldwide. In Central Asia, one of the most intensively irrigated dryland agricultural regions, climate change is likely to exacerbate the regional water supply–demand gaps, particularly in downstream areas. The withdrawal of degraded, highly salinized croplands from irrigated farming in favor of tree plantations that effectively utilize saline groundwater may contribute to irrigation water saving, which can generate valuable ecosystem services and provide rural income opportunities. To facilitate the spatial planning of afforestation in the lower Amudarya region, we developed a hydrological algorithm to map the spatio-temporal pattern of water supply–demand. The resulting map, based on seven-year continuous data of cropping pattern and corresponding irrigation dynamics, rainfall, and evapotranspiration at 250 m resolution, revealed the overly irrigated areas from which excess water can be redistributed to water-stressed areas. Furthermore, combining this information with spatial data on marginally productive croplands and with water requirement of tree plantations showed that 67% of these croplands are characterized by water availability sufficient for the introduction of salt-tolerant tree species. The algorithm developed is of potential use for defining the feasibility of introducing alternative (tree) crops with known growth and water use characteristics.

Forecasting hydrological parameters for reservoir system utilizing artificial intelligent models and exploring their influence on operation performance

Obtaining successful operation rules for dam and reservoir systems is crucial for improving water management to meet the increase in agricultural, domestic and industrial activities. Several research efforts have been developed to generate optimal operation rules for dam and reservoir systems utilizing different optimization algorithms. The main purpose of an operation rule is to minimize the gap between water supply and water demand patterns. To examine the optimized model performance, the simulation of a dam and reservoir system is usually carried out for a particular period utilizing the generated operation rule. During the simulation procedure, although reservoir inflow and evaporation are stochastic variables that are required to be forecasted during simulation, they are considered deterministic variables. This study attempts to integrate a forecasting model for reservoir inflow and evaporation with the operation rules generated from optimization models during the simulation procedure. The present study employs several optimization models to generate an optimal operation rule and two different forecasting models for reservoir inflow and reservoir evaporation. The three different optimization algorithms used in this study are the genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and shark machine learning algorithm (SMLA). Two different forecasting models have been developed for reservoir inflow and evaporation using the radial basis function neural network (RBF-NN) and support vector regression (SVR). It is necessary to analyze the proposed simulation procedure for examining the operation rule to comprehend the analysis under different optimal operation rules and levels of accuracy for both hydrological variables. The suggested models have been applied to generate optimal operation policies and reservoir inflow and evaporation forecasts for the Timah Tasoh dam (TTD) located in Malaysia. The results show that the major findings regarding the model performance during the simulation period indicate the necessity to pay attention to evaluating the optimized model performance by considering the results of the forecasting model for both the hydrological variables of reservoir inflow and reservoir evaporation rather than the deterministic values.

Changing drought vulnerabilities of marginalized resource-dependent groups: a long-term perspective of Israel’s Negev Bedouin

Marginalized resource-dependent groups (MRDGs) are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and weather extremes. However, research on MRDGs tends to analyze their vulnerability in a specific point in time, thereby neglecting the examination of changes that evolve over time spans that are similar to those on which climatic changes occur. This study adopts a long-term perspective, examining changes in the vulnerability of the marginalized and traditionally agro-pastoralist Bedouin residing in the semi-arid and drought-prone northern Negev region. Utilizing multiple data sources, the study compares the vulnerability of the Bedouin during two severe droughts separated by a 40-year period—the 1957–63 drought and the 1998–2000 drought. The changes in the impacts of the droughts on the Bedouin are identified and analyzed, as well as the main factors explaining these changes. The results indicate that the vulnerability of the Bedouin to droughts has declined considerably, largely due to integration in Israel’s market economy and improved access to water infrastructure. Large-scale economic transformations and changes in settlement and water supply patterns explain much of the reduction in vulnerability. However, the Bedouin have remained marginalized and are vulnerable to fluctuations in market conditions. Thus, while we find that the vulnerability of even the most vulnerable groups can decline over time, we also observe that their vulnerability may change its form from “climate vulnerability” to more general social vulnerability.

Transforming Environmental Water Management to Adapt to a Changing Climate

Environmental water management has become a global imperative in response to environmental degradation and the growing recognition that human well-being and livelihoods are critically dependent on freshwater ecosystems and the ecological functions and services they provide. Although a wide range of techniques and strategies for planning and implementing environmental flows has developed, many remain based on assumptions of hydrologic stationarity, typically focusing on restoring freshwater ecosystems to pre-development or ‘natural’ conditions. Climate change raises major challenges to this conventional approach, in part because of increasing uncertainties in patterns of water supply and demand. In such a rapidly changing world, the implementation of, and capacity of water managers to deliver flow regimes resembling historical hydrological patterns may be both unfeasible and undesirable. Additionally, as emphasis shifts from species-focused water allocation plans towards a greater appreciation of freshwater ecological functions and services, many of which will be influenced by climate change, a thorough re-evaluation of the conventional objectives, planning, delivery and monitoring of environmental water, including its role in the broader context of water and environmental management, is essential. Here, we identify the major challenges posed by climate change to environmental water management and discuss key adaptations and research needed to meet these challenges to achieve environmental and societal benefits and avoid maladaptation.

Identification of urban drinking water supply patterns across 627 cities in China based on supervised and unsupervised statistical learning

Urbanization, one of the predominant trends of the 21st century, places great stress on urban water supply networks. This paper aimed to identify the most important variables driving urban water supply patterns in China, a region which has seen rapid urban growth in the last few decades. In addition, a principal component analysis-informed urban water sustainability index was developed in order to benchmark cities. The research involved applying statistical learning and other analytical methods to 12 years of urban water supply data for 627 cities across China. The findings were as follows: (1) PCA showed that approximately 46.8% of variability in the data could be explained by two principal components. Component 1 (37.26%) was more closely associated with variables related to water supply and sale, supply pipelines, and water supply finance. C2 (9.51%) was clearly related to urban water prices and average per capita water use. (2) Random forest and XGBoost algorithms were effective in classifying cities according to their region, with model testing accuracies of 87.69% and 88.32% respectively. (3) Chinese cities have consistently suffered water loss/leakage rates above 20% since 2001, and water prices are closely associated with leakage. (4) China's urban water sustainability has increased by just 3.56% between 2001 and 2013; Southwest China saw the highest growth rate in urban water supply sustainability. The implications of our research effort will be useful for decision makers in water-stressed urban areas around the world who are seeking novel insights in how to leverage statistical learning techniques to gain insights into urban drinking water supply patterns.

Mycorrhizal fungi enhance plant nutrient acquisition and modulate nitrogen loss with variable water regimes.

Climate change will alter both the amount and pattern of precipitation and soil water availability, which will directly affect plant growth and nutrient acquisition, and potentially, ecosystem functions like nutrient cycling and losses as well. Given their role in facilitating plant nutrient acquisition and water stress resistance, arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi may modulate the effects of changing water availability on plants and ecosystem functions. The well-characterized mycorrhizal tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) genotype 76R (referred to as MYC+) and the mutant mycorrhiza-defective tomato genotype rmc were grown in microcosms in a glasshouse experiment manipulating both the pattern and amount of water supply in unsterilized field soil. Following 4weeks of differing water regimes, we tested how AM fungi affected plant productivity and nutrient acquisition, short-term interception of a 15NH4+ pulse, and inorganic nitrogen (N) leaching from microcosms. AM fungi enhanced plant nutrient acquisition with both lower and more variable water availability, for instance increasing plant P uptake more with a pulsed water supply compared to a regular supply and increasing shoot N concentration more when lower water amounts were applied. Although uptake of the short-term 15NH4+ pulse was higher in rmc plants, possibly due to higher N demand, AM fungi subtly modulated NO3- leaching, decreasing losses by 54% at low and high water levels in the regular water regime, with small absolute amounts of NO3- leached (<1kgN/ha). Since this study shows that AM fungi will likely be an important moderator of plant and ecosystem responses to adverse effects of more variable precipitation, management strategies that bolster AM fungal communities may in turn create systems that are more resilient to these changes.

Influence of changes in watershed landuse pattern on the wetland of Sultanpur National Park, Haryana using remote sensing techniques and hydrochemical analysis

Change in water supply and drainage patterns of surface and subsurface moisture zones are greatly enhanced due to anthropogenic activities. Monitoring changing wetland ecosystems helps to determine their tolerance to such anthropogenic activities.Sultanpur National Park, a wetland ecosystem located in Gurgaon district of Haryana state is such an ecosystem, harbouring plant and animal biodiversity. Increase in agriculture and builtup area in the surrounding region along with artificial deepening of the lake area for rainwater accumulation has led to the degradation of the central lake both in terms of quantity and quality. The anthropogenic influence was validated by landuse landcover mapping (through K-means unsupervised classification) of LANDSAT data within the wetland catchment for year 2000 and 2015 having an overall accuracy of 89.45% for 2000 and 80.48% for 2015.A declining trend in the total area under water cover in postmonsoon with a final area reduction of ~66% was observed from the year 1995–2015. Rampant agriculture and builtup land adjacent to the lake as well as artificial pumping of groundwater are major reasons for the deterioration of the lake water quality further posing major threats to the wetland ecosystem.Siltation from erosion and surface runoff due to mining and agriculture have led to the input of ionic components resulting in lake water quality deterioration as well as reduction in the depth of the lake available for rainwater accumulation. It has been inferred that high concentrations of nitrate (50% of samples above permissible limit (> 45ppm)) and phosphate (50% of samples above permissible limit (> 0.1ppm)) ions within the lake water is due to input from surface run off from the surrounding agricultural cropland within the lake catchment further leading to lake eutrophication and habitat loss suitable for plant and animal biodiversity.

Satellite-observed changes in vegetation sensitivities to surface soil moisture and total water storage variations since the 2011 Texas drought

We combine soil moisture (SM) data from AMSR-E and AMSR-2, and changes in terrestrial water storage (TWS) from time-variable gravity data from GRACE to delineate and characterize the evolution of drought and its impact on vegetation growth. GRACE-derived TWS provides spatially continuous observations of changes in overall water supply and regional drought extent, persistence and severity, while satellite-derived SM provides enhanced delineation of shallow-depth soil water supply. Together these data provide complementary metrics quantifying available plant water supply. We use these data to investigate the supply changes from water components at different depths in relation to satellite-based enhanced vegetation index (EVI) and gross primary productivity (GPP) from MODIS and solar-induced fluorescence (SIF) from GOME-2, during and following major drought events observed in the state of Texas, USA and its surrounding semiarid area for the past decade. We find that in normal years the spatial pattern of the vegetation–moisture relationship follows the gradient in mean annual precipitation. However since the 2011 hydrological drought, vegetation growth shows enhanced sensitivity to surface SM variations in the grassland area located in central Texas, implying that the grassland, although susceptible to drought, has the capacity for a speedy recovery. Vegetation dependency on TWS weakens in the shrub-dominated west and strengthens in the grassland and forest area spanning from central to eastern Texas, consistent with changes in water supply pattern. We find that in normal years GRACE TWS shows strong coupling and similar characteristic time scale to surface SM, while in drier years GRACE TWS manifests stronger persistence, implying longer recovery time and prolonged water supply constraint on vegetation growth. The synergistic combination of GRACE TWS and surface SM, along with remote-sensing vegetation observations provides new insights into drought impact on vegetation–moisture relationship, and unique information regarding vegetation resilience and the recovery of hydrological drought.

Dominance of an alien shrub Rhus typhina over a native shrub Vitex negundo var. heterophylla under variable water supply patterns.

Temporal heterogeneity of a resource supply can have a profound effect on the interactions between alien and native plant species and their potential invasiveness. Precipitation patterns may be variable and result in a higher heterogeneity of water supply with global climate change. In this study, an alien shrub species, Rhus typhina, introduced to China from North America and a native shrub species, Vitex negundo var. heterophylla, were grown in monoculture and mixed culture under different water supply regimes, with four levels of water supply frequencies but with a constant level of total supplied water. After 60 days of treatments, the alien species was found to be the superior competitor in the mixed culture and was unaffected by changes in the water supply pattern. The dominance of R. typhina was mainly owing to its greater biomass and effective modulation of leaf physiology. However, in the mixed culture, V. negundo var. heterophylla exhibited both leaf- and whole-plant-level acclimations, including higher leaf length to petiole length and root to shoot biomass ratios, and lower specific leaf weight and leaf length to leaf width ratio. Plant height of V. negundo var. heterophylla was comparable to that of R. typhina in the mixed culture, which is a strategy to escape shading. Although water treatments had little effect on most traits in both species, the possible influence of water regimes should not be neglected. Compared with high-frequency water supply treatments, more individuals of V. negundo var. heterophylla died in low-water-frequency treatments when in competition with R. typhina, which may lead to species turnover in the field. The authors recommended that caution should be exercised when introducing R. typhina to non-native areas in the context of global climate change.

Formulation of the Pump Operations Optimization Problem for a Harvested Stormwater System

As climate change and population growth, among other factors, put pressure on traditional water supplies, alternative sources of water are increasingly being used to supplement demand, particularly for non-potable applications. Stormwater from urban catchments can be harvested and treated to supply irrigation demands of public green spaces such as parks, reserves and sporting grounds. Operation of such systems often requires several pumping stages between multiple storage ponds, which can result in a significant amount of energy use and also increases the complexity of the operations. In many water supply systems, demand rates and patterns are determined by when consumers choose to use water and how much they use, thus the demands constrain the system operation. For irrigation of public green spaces, however, the operators can prescribe when water should be used at each demand point, and thus the demand pattern is a choice rather than a constraint. This paper discusses how harvested stormwater systems with multiple pumping stages can simulated as multiple ‘sub-systems’ in order to better understand the hydraulics and better formulate the corresponding optimization problem. A case study site from Australia that utilizes harvested stormwater for non-potable irrigation demands is used to demonstrate the simulation approach. Simulating the case study in smaller ‘sub-systems’ has highlighted the need for better pump and tank sizing for the system, and has then informed the optimization problem formulation.