Hydrological response of an afforested catchment in a Mediterranean humid mountain area: a comparative study with a natural forest

The effects of afforestation on water resources are still controversial. The aim of this paper is to (i) analyse the hydrological response of an afforested area in the Central Pyrenees and (ii) compare the hydrological response of an afforested area with the response observed in a natural undisturbed forest. The Araguás catchment was cultivated until the 1950s, and then afforested with pines in an effort to control the active degradation processes. The hydrological response was variable and complex, because the discharge was generated by a combination of distinct runoff processes. The hydrological response showed that (i) afforestation produced moderate peak discharges, stormflows and recession limbs, and long rising limbs; (ii) no one single variable was able to explain the hydrological response: rainfall volume and intensity did not explain the hydrological response and antecedent rainfall and initial discharge (indicating antecedent moisture conditions) did play an important role; (iii) seasonal differences were observed suggesting different runoff generating processes; and (iv) the effect of forest cover on peak discharges became less important as the size of the hydrological event increased. The stormflow coefficient showed a clear seasonal pattern with an alternation between a wet period, when the catchment was hydrologically responsive, and a dry summer period when the catchment rarely responded to any event, and two transitional periods (wetting and drying). Compared with a natural forest, the afforested area recorded greater flows and peak discharges, faster response times and shorter recession limbs. Afforestation reduces the water yield and the number of floods compared with non‐vegetated areas and abandoned lands. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Spatial and Seasonal Patterns of Salinity in a Large and Shallow Tropical Estuary of the Western Caribbean

Salinity profiles and meteorological data were analyzed during February, May, and September 2006 in Chetumal Bay, a large, shallow estuary of the Western Caribbean. Local meteorological conditions revealed three seasons: (1) a dry season (March–May); (2) a wet season (June–October); and (3) the nortes season, with northerly wind events (October–February). During the nortes and wet seasons, salinity ranged between 13 and 16 psu, and salinity was highest in the dry season, ranging between 18 and 22 psu over most of the area; a strong stratification and a significant contribution of salty water characterized this season. Strong horizontal gradients were observed near Rio Hondo during the three seasons. Deep and narrow peculiar bathymetric features called the pozas showed a strong stratification and a relatively high salinity. The northern part of Chetumal Bay and probably the entire system are far from being homogeneous.     

Return to <Emphasis Type="Italic">Neverland</Emphasis>: Shifting Baselines Affect Eutrophication Restoration Targets

The implicit assumption of many scientific and regulatory frameworks that ecosystems impacted by human pressures may be reverted to their original condition by suppressing the pressure was tested using coastal eutrophication. The response to nutrient abatement of four thoroughly studied coastal ecosystems that received increased nutrient inputs between the 1970s and the 1980s showed that the trajectories of these ecosystems were not directly reversible. All four ecosystems displayed convoluted trajectories that failed to return to the reference status upon nutrient reduction. This failure is proposed to result from the broad changes in environmental conditions, all affecting ecosystem dynamics, that occurred over the 30 years spanning from the onset of eutrophication to the reduction of nutrient levels. Understanding ecosystem response to multiple shifting baselines is essential to set reliable targets for restoration efforts.     

Ornamental plants and the production of nature(s) in the Spanish real estate boom and bust: the case of Alicante

The Spanish real estate boom and bust of the 2000s caused immense economic, social, and environmental changes across the country. Massive urbanization, however, does not necessarily entail the end of nature and natural processes, instead marking a radical transformation of environments and societies. Through a political ecology approach, we analyze how ornamental species have become a fundamental part of new natures induced by urbanization in the Spanish province of Alicante. We connect the economic and ecological characteristics of ornamental plants like the palm tree to urbanization and real estate trends in Alicante. Our evidence indicates that, in Alicante, economic recession and environmental crises (manifested in the pests affecting palm trees) have mutually reinforced one other, creating a new geography of ecological desolation in many areas.     

Possibilities and limits of prospective GIS land cover modelling—a compared case study: Garrotxes (France) and Alta Alpujarra Granadina (Spain)

This study focuses on the possibilities and the limits of a prospective GIS land cover modelling applied to two case studies (France and Spain). The methodology, based on available GIS tools, consists of using earlier land cover maps and relevant environmental factors (calibration data) to model actual, known land cover to validate the model. The model aggregates Markov chain analysis for time prediction and multi‐critera evaluation, multi‐objective evaluation and cellular automata to perform spatial contiguity of modelled land cover scores. The first results give an accurate, pixel by pixel prediction rate of approximately 75%. An important issue of this study consists of analysing prediction residues to improve the model.     

An OLS regression model for context-aware tile prefetching in a web map cache

The increasing popularity of web map services has motivated the development of more scalable services in the spatial data infrastructures. Tiled map services have emerged as a scalable alternative to traditional map services. Instead of rendering map images on the fly, a collection of pre-generated image tiles can be served very fast from a server-side cache. However, during the start-up of the service, the cache is initially empty and users experience a poor quality of service. Tile prefetching attempts to improve hit rates by proactively fetching map images without waiting for client requests.

While most popular prefetching policies in traditional web caching consider only the previous access history to make predictions, significant improvements could be achieved in web mapping by taking into account the background geographic information.

This work proposes a regressive model to predict which areas are likely to be requested in the future based on spatial cross-correlation between an unconstrained catalog of geographic features and a record of past cache requests. Tiles that are anticipated to be most frequently requested can be pre-generated and cached for faster retrieval. Trace-driven simulations with several million cache requests from two different nation-wide public web map services in Spain demonstrate that accurate predictions and performance gains can be obtained with the proposed model.     

Temporal dynamics of soil water balance components in a karst range in southeastern Spain: estimation of potential recharge

Abstract

This paper analyses the temporal dynamics of soil water balance components in a representative recharge area of the Sierra de Gádor (Almeria, southeastern Spain) in two hydrological years. Two approaches are used to estimate daily potential recharge (PR): Approach 1 based on deriving PR from the water balance as the difference between measurements of rainfall (P) and actual evapotranspiration (E) obtained by eddy covariance; and Approach 2 with PR obtained from the dynamic pattern of the soil moisture (θ) recorded at two depths in the site's thin soil (average 0.35 m thickess). For the hydrological year 2003/04, which was slightly drier than the 30-year average, E accounted for 64% of rainfall and occurred mainly in late spring and early summer. The PR estimated by Approach 1 was 181 ± 18 mm year^-1 (36% of rainfall), suggesting an effective groundwater recharge in the study area. In the unusually dry hydrological year 2004/05, E was about 215 mm year^-1, close to the annual rainfall input, and allowing very little (8 ± 12 mm year^-1) PR according to Approach 1. Estimation of PR based on Approach 2 resulted in PR rates lower than those found by Approach 1, because Approach 2 does not take into account the recharge that occurs through preferential flow pathways (cracks, joints and fissures) which were not monitored with the θ probes. Moreover, using Approach 2, the PR estimates differed widely depending on the time scale considered: with daily mean θ data, PR estimation was lower, especially in late spring, while θ data at 30 min resolution yielded a more reliable prediction of the fraction of total PR resulting from the downward movement of soil water by gravity.

Citation Cantón, Y., Villagarcía, L., Moro, M. J., Serrano-Ortíz, P., Were, A., Alcalá, F. J., Kowalski, A. S., Solé-Benet, A., Lázaro, R. & Domingo, F. (2010) Temporal dynamics of soil water balance components in a karst range in southeastern Spain: estimation of potential recharge. Hydrol. Sci. J. 55(5), 737–753.