Panola Mountain Research Watershed

September 16, 2009
12:30 - 2:00 pm
Hardin Hall
East Campus, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Norman (Jake) Peters, Atlanta, Georgia, will present a lecture on the Panola Mountain Research Watershed in the first floor auditorium of Hardin Hall, University of Nebraska-Lincoln East Campus on Wednesday, Sept. 16.

“Evolution of hydrological and biogeochemical process understanding at a Water, Energy, and Biogeochemical Budgets Program site: Panola Mountain Research Watershed, Georgia” will detail the PMRW, a relatively undisturbed forested watershed near Atlanta, Ga.

Research there began 25 years ago, evaluating methods for measuring dry atmospheric deposition and to determine watershed processes controlling acid neutralization, which provided some process understanding and quantification.

Since 1991 when PMRW became a Water, Energy, and Biogeochemical Budgets Program site, the research has expanded scope of basic hydrological and biogeochemical processes to include the effects of climatic variables, and human influences on watershed processes.

Process conceptualization of PMRW has evolved from:

1. Rainfall on and runoff from bedrock outcrop areas moving rapidly through the watershed to episodic subsurface flow on and leakage through bedrock outcrops and major leakage through bedrock underlying soil-mantled hillslopes;
2. Uniform flow through soils to preferential flow producing high sulfate concentrations in ground and stream water;
3. Vertical recharge and discharge of riparian zone aquifers to threshold (non linear) linking stream-riparian zone interactions with hillslope connectivity linking groundwater levels, soil moisture content, precipitation and stormflows;
4. Simple mixing model assessments of hydrologic pathway contributions to stream solute fluxes to multi-end member mixing analysis, which provide quantification of end member contributions; and
5. Uniform distributions of soil moisture content to temporal and spatial varying hillslope soil moisture content affected by trees through evapotranspiration.

In addition, research also has evolved our understanding of factors affecting atmospheric deposition and canopy interactions, calcium depletion, carbon sequestration and respiration, mercury cycling, weathering, and groundwater residence times and included modeling.

The evolution in process understanding also involved changes in approach/scale for hypothesis testing and serendipity.

The lecture is being sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey Nebraska Water Science Center.