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Alexandra Lutz

This project links climate, hydrological, and ecological changes over the next 30 years in a Great Basin watershed. In recent years, climate variability on annual and decadal time scales has been recognized as greater than commonly perceived with increasing impacts on ecosystems and available water resources. Changes in vegetation distribution, composition and productivity resulting from climate change affect plant water use, which in turn can alter stream flow, groundwater and eventually available water resources. To better understand these links, project researchers implemented two computer-based numeric models in the Cleve Creek watershed in the Schell Creek Range, east of Ely, Nevada. The application of the...
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Environmental Characteristics of Great Basin and Mojave Desert Spring Systems
FY2014This project builds upon the springs and seeps inventory funded by the Desert LCC.This project will: Fill a significant gap in aquatic habitat information for scenario planning. Create a publically available geospatial database of approximately 2,000+ known Great Basin springs. Create a summary report on the biotic and abiotic conditions of the known springs.
Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eco.1723/full): Quantifying the regulation of precipitation-associated vegetation dynamics on land surface water balance poses a particular challenge in current eco-hydrological studies because terrestrial ecological processes interact with hydrological processes, and both are subject to precipitation change. The objective of this study is to examine how precipitation change-associated vegetation dynamics may regulate catchment water balance in a semiarid to arid mountain ecosystem. To achieve this objective, R-RHESSys, which is short for rasterised regional hydro-ecological simulation system, a distributed hydro-ecological model, was applied to the Cleve...
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Understanding and Projecting Changes in Climate, Hydrology, and Ecology in the Great Basin for the Next 30 Years
This project links climate, hydrological, and ecological changes over the next 30 years in a Great Basin watershed. In recent years, climate variability on annual and decadal time scales has been recognized as greater than commonly perceived with increasing impacts on ecosystems and available water resources. Changes in vegetation distribution, composition and productivity resulting from climate change affect plant water use, which in turn can alter stream flow, groundwater and eventually available water resources. To better understand these links, project researchers implemented two computer-based numeric models in the Cleve Creek watershed in the Schell Creek Range, east of Ely, Nevada. The application of the...
Categories: Project; Types: Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: 2013, CASC, Cleve Creek, Climate, Completed, All tags...
Environmental conditions recorded at 2,256 Great Basin and Mojave Desert springs that were inventoried from the late 1980s into 2013 are summarized. These records provide information about individual springs and their spatial variability across the landscape. Insight into their changing condition is provided by records compiled at springs visited several times over more than 20 years. Although this summary considers a small proportion of springs in this region, it provides broad insight into their size, basic water chemistry, and conditions that are indicative of springs over a large portion of the southwestern US.
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