Professor Derek Eamus

"Ecohydrology" - Water, Forests and Climate, a ménage à trois.

Professor Eamus’ research has resulted in several fundamental advances in our understanding of the water budgets of Australian ecosystems, by examining the linkages across leaf, tree, canopy and landscape-scale processes. His work has integrated the interactions of micro-meteorological, soil and plant variables, which determine the rates of water and carbon exchange between landscape and atmosphere.

The award of this LWA Senior Research Fellowship allowed him to review, synthesise and communicate to a diverse audience of managers, end-users and policy makers, the application of our current scientific understanding of ecohydrology to the challenges posed by climate change, management of groundwater dependent ecosystems and water-vegetation interactions.

Project Objectives

• To review and synthesise our current understanding of the three-way interactions among water, forests and climate. The purpose of the review is to generate the products listed later in this proposal. (ca 40 % of time)
• To translate this synthesis into accessible and useful products for improved natural resource management (NRM) and also to contribute to policy development, policy implementation and policy review. These products are targeted to water managers, including, for example, CMAs, NRM Boards, water resource planners, NRM facilitators, and private, State and Federal managers and owners of land and water resources. (ca 60 % of time)

To answer the following key questions across three themes (A = Groundwater Dependent Ecosystems; B = water budgets; C = climate change) that are required by water planners and NRM decision makers at local and regional levels in local, regional and state organisations:

In relation to management of groundwater dependent ecosystems (GDE) and groundwater resources:

• How can managers and owners of land identify GDEs?
• What attributes of vegetation can be measured easily and which have critical threshold values which can be used as indicators of ecosystem health to monitor the impacts of groundwater extraction, thereby preventing extraction from having a negative impact on the health of the GDE? That is, what should we measure (and how) in order to monitor the impact of groundwater extraction on associated GDEs?
• What is the inter-annual risk to GDE health of extracting groundwater to a known depth, given natural inter-annual variation in rainfall?
• How much groundwater does a GDE require and how does inter-annual variation in rainfall influence the dependency of vegetation on groundwater?

In relation to issues surrounding quantification of catchment water budgets:

• How much water does a plantation or stand of native forest use, per year?
• How does woody thickening change the water budget of a landscape?
• How does forest water use vary with the age of the stand? What are the impacts of widespread fire on water use by forests?

In relation to climate change issues:

• How will annual water use of a forest change in response to increased atmospheric levels of CO2?
• What is the response of forest growth and forest water use to changes in rainfall?
• What is the trade-off between increased C sequestration in new plantations and decreased water yield as the plantation grows through to maturity?

More information

• Plant Functional Biology and Climate Change Cluster,  University of Technology, Sydney
• Co-funded Centre for Groundwater Research and Training, Australian Research Council
• Derek Eamus at the University of Technology, Sydney

Publications and Resources

None listed

Citation

Land & Water Australia. 2009. Professor Derek Eamus. [Online] (Updated August 5th, 2009)
Available at: http://lwa.gov.au/node/3233 [Accessed Tuesday 26th of April 2011 12:43:02 AM ].