Scientific publications

Hydrological connectivity controls runoff response in those northern landscapes that can be characterized as patchy or heterogeneous. This is problematic for catchment modeling because how to efficiently represent connectivity over space and time in a patchy landscape is not necessarily obvious. The pattern of hydrological elements over which a drainage network passes is considered in an attempt to understand how the landscape heterogeneity should be sampled in order to best represent it for the purposes of runoff modeling. The present study addresses how drainage density and sampling frequency influence the nature of the probability density function of hydrological elements along a drainage network in a typical heterogeneous subarctic Canadian Shield catchment. Upon generating fifty five sequences, the results imply that these two factors do influence sequence representation, and that the typical or representative sequence is one dominated by lakes. The gross variation in this sequence can be characterized into three phases. These phases were a function of the rate of change in drainage density with defined minimum contributing area. Since drainage density can be representative of the moisture state of a catchment, the results imply that parameterization of patchy landscapes for hydrological modelling needs to be dynamic and may need to be a function of the moisture state of the catchment.