Talk

Surface Water Dynamics and Environmental Change at the Subcontinental Scale

Thursday, Apr 13, 2017 - 11:00am - 12:00pm
Event Location
Schmidt Conference Center

Event Details

Summary:

Surface water is a critical resource in semi-arid areas. In Australia, competing water demands, combined with changes in climate and land use as well as multi-year droughts, such as the Millennium Drought that ended in 2009, have led to water shortages, particularly in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). The MDB is a large (more than 1 million km2), semi-arid basin that experiences extreme hydroclimatic variability and competing water demands, of high economic importance given that it accounts for 40 percent of Australia’s gross value in agricultural production.

In this seminar, Dr. Tulbure will present (1) the development of a statistically validated surface water and flooding extent dynamics data set (SWD) based on 3 decades (1986-2011) of seasonally continuous Landsat TM and ETM + archives and generic random forest-based models, and ongoing applications of the SWD, including (2) the quantification of key drivers of surface water extent dynamics, (3) spatiotemporal connectivity dynamics, and (4) vegetation response to flooding, including river red gum communities, an iconic riparian eucalyptus species that has suffered dieback.