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| Titel |
“As much as you can, in as many places as you can as often as you can”: an example from a large catchment North East Scotland. |
| VerfasserIn |
Chris Soulsby, Doerthe Tetzlaff |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2011
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 13 (2011) |
| Datensatznummer |
250050865
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| Zusammenfassung |
| The Colin Neal philosophy of monitoring “everything, everywhere, all the time” has been
rooted in three decades of research at the nested Plynlimon catchments in Wales.
Colin’s work has extended way beyond this small part of the Welsh mountains
to other sites in the UK uplands; lowland catchments in England (as part of the
LOCAR initiative), all the UK river basins draining into the North Sea (as part
of the LOIS initiative) and international locations as disparate as Norway, Spain,
Zimbabwe and Amazonia. Nevertheless, Plynlimon remains the location of his most
significant scientific discoveries which show that insights in catchment science usually
come from “digging in” at intensively monitored sites over a long period of time
where incremental understanding of physical, chemical and biological processes
become greatly amplified by the improved context of monitoring hydroclimatic
variability and extremes. In this contribution we will show how this philosophy
has played out in the 2000km2 Dee catchment in North East Scotland. Starting
with ecohydrology studies into Atlantic salmon in 1966 in the 30km2 Girnock
catchment, the Dee has become one of the intensively investigated larger catchments in
Europe with long-term and multi-scale data sets that encapsulate the interdisciplinary
nature of contemporary catchment science. From a basic understanding of fish
populations and hydrological and hydrochemical function, this work has evolved
into increasingly constrained, long-term insights into how spatial heterogeneity in
process underpins emergent, predictable attributes of hydrological, biogeochemical,
hydromorphological and ecohydrological function. Examples will be drawn from topical
issues such as flood generation, transit time estimates, thermal regimes, carbon cycling,
agricultural pollution and salmon population dynamics to show how long-term,
spatially nested data sets are an essential prerequisite to any attempts to predict future
provision of catchment ecosystem services in an era of unprecedented climate change. |
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