engleski

The application of BROOK90 ecohydrological model in the estimation of soil water status in poplar plantations affected by groundwater decline.

In the past decades there has been evidence of shifting hydrological conditions in forest ecosystems, mostly due to the changes in global climate, but also due to anthropogenic influences. Such changes could cause irreversible disruption in sustainable management of forests which requires new adaptive management strategies to cope with it. The main prerequisite for the application of adaptive management requires distinctive knowledge of the hydrologic state in a particular forest site, according to which various options could be considered. Traditional measurements of water status in soils are mostly time consuming, which lead to postponed managerial decisions and which can be quite unfavourable in situations of rapid progression of forest decline. For this reason, today's managerial practice and policy makers increasingly depend upon scaling solutions which can provide fast and accurate answers to emerging questions and needs. In this study an example of such a scaling approach is presented using a physically-based hydrologic model to determine the site condition with respect to water status in soils. This case study was performed in the floodplain of the river Drava, in the area of Valpovo and Osijek. The common tree cover of these sites consists of planted Euro-American poplar species, mostly P. × Canadensis, P. Deltoides. Preliminarily research confirms significant hydrologic changes in these sites in terms of a significant drop in groundwater and a reduction in occasional flooding from the river Drava. This change triggers a downgrade in health condition and productivity of the poplar plantations, where strong irreversible forest decline is noticeable. In this paper we assess the soil water conditions, the deficit of soil water and water stress indices on these sites, using ecohydrologic model BROOK90.

Brook90; hydrologic modelling; poplar plantations; groundwater decline

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