3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

The purpose of this class is to understand the landscape-scale controls on the fluxes of water and waterborne materials through watersheds. This class differs from the Hydrology and Hydrologic Modeling classes in its focus on data analysis, and its embrace of the complexity of real landscapes. There will be significant quantitative components to the material taught, but emphasis will be on developing a greater sense of the way that landscapes “function”, and how this function is related to real-world issues of water resources and pollution. Students will gain an understanding of how climate, geologic and ecologic setting, and human impacts control the partitioning of water between different fates, the flowpaths through the landscape and the storage and residence time of water. They will also learn conceptual and practical tools for analyzing hydrologic and other landscape data, and integrating this data in a holistic approach to watershed analysis. The class will be of interest for students intending to go into watershed or landscape management, and anyone wishing to pursue research in hydrology, geomorphology or ecology at landscape and watershed scales. The class will include at least one field trip to an instrumented watershed. GIS skills will be an advantage but are not required.