Reservoir Futures: Water quality across the land-lake continuum

River dams and reservoirs provide a suite of ecosystem services, such as irrigation, flood control, or hydropower, but are also one of the key anthropogenic disruptors of the landscape, altering the movement of water, solutes and organisms across the land ocean continuum. Hundreds of small reservoirs across the landscape not only create lags in nutrient delivery, but also harbor memories of past nutrient legacies deep in its sediments. Given their integral role in societal functioning, they also provide nodes of opportunities to actively manage our water resources, and mitigate some of the impacts of anthropogenic land use. However, reservoirs and lakes have often been studied in isolation of the watershed that drains into it, with limnologists simplifying watershed inputs in their conceptualization and models, while hillslope hydrologists often ignoring the significant role reservoirs play in altering flow and concentration dynamics. Here, we use a combination of data synthesis and modeling to explore how climate and land use in the reservoir-shed impacts reservoir functioning, and in-turn how reservoir functioning and management across a network of hundreds of reservoirs can alter the quality of downstream waters.   

Tutorial/Invited: Invited

Primary Presenter: Nandita Basu, University of Waterloo (nandita.basu@uwaterloo.ca)

Authors:

Nandita Basu, University of Waterloo  (nandita.basu@uwaterloo.ca)

Ruchi Bhattacharya, Cleveland State University  (r.bhattacharya14@csuohio.edu)

Shuyu Chang, Penn State University  (shuyu.chang@psu.edu)

Kimberly Van Meter, Penn State University  (vanmeterKVM@psu.edu)