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Annual water, sediment, nutrient, and organic carbon fluxes in river basins: A global meta‐analysis as a function of scale

OAR@ICRISAT

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Relation http://oar.icrisat.org/10807/
https://doi.org/10.1002/2014WR016668
0.1002/2014WR016668
 
Title Annual water, sediment, nutrient, and organic carbon fluxes in river basins: A global meta‐analysis as a function of scale
 
Creator Mutema, M
Chaplot, V
Jewitt, G
Chivenge, P
Bloschl, G
 
Subject Soil
Soil Science
Climate Change
Water Resources
 
Description Process controls on water, sediment, nutrient, and organic carbon exports from the landscape through runoff are not fully understood. This paper provides analyses from 446 sites worldwide to evaluate the impact of environmental factors (MAP and MAT: mean annual precipitation and temperature; CLAY and BD: soil clay content and bulk density; S: slope gradient; LU: land use) on annual exports (RC: runoff coefficients; SL: sediment loads; TOCL: organic carbon losses; TNL: nitrogen losses; TPL: phosphorus losses) from different spatial scales. RC was found to increase, on average, from 18% at local scale (in headwaters), 25% at microcatchment and subcatchment scale (midreaches) to 41% at catchment scale (lower reaches of river basins) in response to multiple factors. SL increased from microplots (468 g m−2 yr−1) to plots (901 g m−2 yr−1), accompanied by decreasing TOCL and TNL. Climate was a major control masking the effects of other factors. For example, RC, SL, TOCL, TNL, and TPL tended to increase with MAP at all spatial scales. These variables, however, decreased with MAT. The impact of CLAY, BD, LU, and S on erosion variables was largely confined to the hillslope scale, where RC, SL, and TOCL decreased with CLAY, while TNL and TPL increased. The results contribute to better understanding of water, nutrient, and carbon cycles in terrestrial ecosystems and should inform river basin modeling and ecosystem management. The important role of spatial climate variability points to a need for comparative research in specific environments at nested spatiotemporal scales.
 
Publisher Wiley
 
Date 2015-09
 
Type Article
PeerReviewed
 
Format application/pdf
 
Language en
 
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Identifier http://oar.icrisat.org/10807/1/Annual%20water%2C%20sediment%2C%20nutrient%2C%20and%20organic%20carbon%20fluxes.pdf
Mutema, M and Chaplot, V and Jewitt, G and Chivenge, P and Bloschl, G (2015) Annual water, sediment, nutrient, and organic carbon fluxes in river basins: A global meta‐analysis as a function of scale. Water Resources Research, 51 (11). pp. 8949-8972. ISSN 0043-1397