Physically-Based Prediction of Water Yield from Disturbed Forested Water Supply Catchments

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Lane Feikema, Paul M. Sherwin, C. B. Peel, M. C. Freebairn, A. C.
Copyright Year	2007
Abstract	Disturbance of forested catchments by fire, logging, or other natural or human induced events that alter the evapotranspiration regime may be a substantial threat to domestic, environmental and industrial water supplies. While security of water supplies have always been of high importance in Australia, the recent long-lived drought, climate change predictions and two major “mega fire” events in 4 years that have burnt over 2 million ha of native forest in Victoria alone, have placed alarming uncertainty on the State’s water resources. Furthermore, there are predictions of more frequent and intense wildfire under climate change (Howe et al., 2005). Physically-based models that can predict the hydrologic impact of forest disturbance and climatic inputs will be crucial for understanding changed water yields and for informing forest management options. One such model is Macaque (Watson, 1999), a physically based spatially distributed daily time step process model that was developed specifically to replicate the water yield variation over time observed in Victorian central highland catchments after the 1939 bushfires. This paper describes the modelling of the long term changes in water yield from two fire affected catchments, and of fire and climate change scenarios in Melbourne’s principal water supply catchment (488km). The effect of scale, data availability and quality, and of species parameterisation is explored.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://www.mssanz.org.au/MODSIM07/papers/53_s52/Physically-baseds52_Lane_.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://mssanz.org.au/MODSIM07/papers/53_s52/Physically-baseds52_Lane_.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article