Watershed Function Science Focus Area: Functional Traits and Watershed Resilience

Interactions of warming and drought with hydro-biogeochemical functioning in mountainous watersheds

Project website | Overview brochure PDF

Principal investigator: Eoin Brodie

Laboratory Research Manager: Kristin Boye

Watersheds provide key resources for human populations, with pressing demands for clean water, food, and energy. In parallel, compounding disturbances are significantly reshaping interactions within watersheds throughout the world. Mountainous watersheds are the “water towers of the world” with more than 40% currently supporting a seasonal snowpack critical for water storage and release to regions downstream.

Regional modeling and observational studies of Western U.S. mountainous systems suggest significant changes in snowpack and snowmelt timing within the coming decades, in addition to temperature-driven extremes (e.g., heatwaves and drought) in regions such as the Upper Colorado River Basin (URCB). Most water and water-borne nutrients, carbon, and other environmentally important elements enter river networks through headwater catchments that can be highly variable but are not well understood.

This research aims to quantify this variability and reduce the uncertainty in predictions of temperature-driven disturbance impacts on these ecosystems and their services. A deeper understanding of mountainous watershed functions is needed as changing mountainous hydroclimate is projected to cause trillion dollar impacts across the Western United States in coming decades.

To accomplish this goal, the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program within the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science is supporting the Watershed Function Science Focus Area (SFA). The SFA is an integrated, multi-institutional project focused on interacting impacts of warming and drought on the hydro-biogeochemical functioning of mountainous watersheds and their retention or release of water, carbon, nitrogen, and other critical elements.

Watershed Function SFA research focuses on the UCRB and builds upon research in the East River while expanding into the Taylor River watershed. Both are representative and vulnerable headwater systems within the UCRB, collectively forming the Gunnison River mainstem that accounts for just under half of the Colorado River’s discharge at the Colorado/Utah border. The Colorado River and its headwater tributaries supply water for municipal use to more than one in 10 Americans, irrigation for more than 5.5 million acres, and more than 4,200 megawatts of electrical-generating capacity for millions of people.

Research Focus Areas

Within the SFA, three Research Focus Areas (RFAs) explore how hydrological, ecological, and biogeochemical processes react and interact, shaping watershed response to environmental change now and in the future. A central hub (ModEx Integration Core) connects these areas, allowing for continuous model refinement and model-driven observation and experimentation.

RFA1: Disturbance Impacts and Resilience will investigate the hydrological, ecological, and biogeochemical functional response of watersheds to recent disturbance as a function of trait distributions across watershed systems to identify critical functional traits and their interactions.

RFA2: Pathways of Adaptation will explore how watersheds will adapt under a changing environment and how changing trait distributions, brought about by temperature-driven changes to the energy-water balance, affect hydro-biogeochemistry.

RFA3: Trait Covariation, Aggregation, and Transfer will determine the properties of watershed trait covariation, ascertain how functional trait covariation aggregates to influence watershed function (e.g., nitrogen export) using high-resolution ecosystem models, and develop machine learning–based surrogates for knowledge transfer and scaling beyond subcatchments.

Understanding the mechanisms that underlie watershed resistance and resilience to disturbance and identifying pathways of adaptation to future low-snow conditions will enable informed decision-making regarding water resources, land management, and environmental change adaptation, particularly in mountainous regions.

Project Culture and Collaboration

The SFA team is committed to creating a project culture that is safe, secure, open, and inclusive. The SFA promotes recruitment and retention of a diverse group of scientists and staff internal to both Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The team also introduces DOE–funded, national laboratory–led scientific research to a diverse community of faculty, postdocs, and students, as well as other engaged entities across local and federal agencies and Indigenous peoples. The SFA promotes two-way knowledge sharing to co-develop approaches that enhance watershed and forest health.

The SFA is aligned with a key LBNL priority called Biological and Environmental Program Integration Center (BioEPIC), a new building that will provide one-of-a-kind experimental capabilities for deep investigation of soil-microbe-plant interactions under controlled laboratory conditions and through virtual connections to field sites. The team also leverages other significant BER investments, including ESS-DIVE, IDEAS, and KBase, and takes advantage of BER-supported facilities, such as JGI and EMSL, as well as SLAC core capabilities in synchrotron science and DOE National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center supercomputing and Energy Sciences Network capabilities.

2024 Abstracts