Special Session on:
Computational Ecohydrology

Conveners:

Valeriy Ivanov, University of Michigan
Enrique Vivoni, Arizona State University

Description:

The interplay of abiotic factors with terrestrial ecosystems has been the subject of growing interest in a number of Earth science disciplines. The dynamic nature of such interactions often leads to bilateral feedbacks and nonlinearities that have been previously oversimplified. The transition to explicit quantitative description of these interactions has proven to be challenging because of limited understanding of involved processes and dependencies as well as scale issues. This session will focus on the scientific issues related to enhancing our knowledge of biotic-abiotic process coupling and their scaling properties, the development of innovative numerical methods describing these interactions, and the further evolution of fully-coupled landscape models that capture the role of biota in the dynamics of hydrological and hydrodynamic processes. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

-- Plant life-cycle processes and their representation in ecohydrological models
-- Models of plant-scale hydraulics and biophysics and upscaling methodologies
-- Ecohydrology of root dynamics and below-ground carbon and nutrient pools
-- Representation of vegetation biodiversity and heterogeneity in large-scale models
-- Modeling spatial vegetation processes, including competition and symbiosis
-- Modeling long-term controls of dynamic vegetation on the hydrological response
-- Vegetation and boundary layer interactions
-- Modeling watershed impacts on ecology of aquatic plant and fish habitats
-- Simulation of plant effects on flow hydrodynamics and sediment transport
-- Herbivory disturbances in watershed models and land-surface parameterizations