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Awarded grant: Multi-scale Monitoring and Modeling of Land Use and Climate Change Impacts on the Terrestrial Hydrologic Cycle: Implications for the Great Lakes Basin

Hyndman, David, Professor, hyndman@msu.edu; Web site

  • Department: Geological Sciences
  • Title: Multi-scale Monitoring and Modeling of Land Use and Climate Change Impacts on the Terrestrial Hydrologic Cycle: Implications for the Great Lakes Basin
  • Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
  • Amount of grant: $243,552
  • Duration of grant: 9/1/2009 - 8/31/2012
  • Summary: The details of plant water use across ranges of scales are often poorly understood. With projected changes in climate and land use there is a critical need to understand the likely impacts on the hydrologic cycle and ecosystem health. This project will quantify dynamics of vegetation-water interactions across different land cover types to improve predictive capabilities of hydrologic models and explore the impacts of land use and climate changes along the range from watershed to Great Lakes Basin. The research team, including students, will use time-lapse electrical resistivity imaging and novel coupling of a terrestrial hydrology model with a dynamic vegetation growth model to study managed and natural sites along a climate gradient across a range of soils. Results will include improved knowledge and predictive capability of processes that drive the terrestrial water cycle, root-zone moisture and root-development data that will improve parameterization of roots in coupled land surface and climate models, and quantitative information about implications of land use and climate changes across a range of scales. The analysis will provide a critical foundation for exploring the impacts of biofuel crop development and reforestation for energy independence and carbon sequestration initiatives. Results will be important for policy decisions on the environmental sustainability of various land management options.

 

 


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