Interplay of climate and land-use change on transport dynamics of intensively managed landscapes: a catchment travel time distribution analysis

Abstract:

Climatic trends and extensive implementation of drainage tiles in poorly drained agricultural lands have left significant fingerprints on the hydrology and water quality of the receiving streams. Tiles were initially designed to increase the crop productivity by removing excess soil moisture and improving field conditions. However, their hydro-ecological consequences have gradually emerged through observations of enhanced rates of nitrate and phosphorus delivered to the streams, as well as altered runoff volumes and timing. The Redwood River Basin (a 1,800 km² basin located in southwest Minnesota) is an example of such a system where a considerable switch from small grains to row crops has taken place since 1970’s, driving intensive tile installation culminating in a doubling of tiled length in the past two decades. Long-term hydrologic analysis of this basin shows that the daily streamflow has increased in all months after the land-use change period, and rising limbs of daily hydrographs exhibit increased dependence on precipitation during May-June. In this study we employ the recently developed theory of time-variant travel time distributions within the storage selection function framework to examine the interplay of climate and land-use change on transport dynamics. Comparison of two periods representing the tiled and untiled conditions demonstrates 18-38 days decrease in the mean travel time due to tile drainage during spring-summer, while almost no change is observed during winter showing an overall cyclic behavior over a year. Statistics of the marginal distributions also show less variability in the mean travel time for the tiled period, probably revealing the response of the more constrained engineered system. Furthermore, the relative impact of the climate and the spatial heterogeneity of the soil properties on the travel times are investigated via numerical experiments performed on nested sub-basins under untiled condition. The simulations suggest that climate dynamics have more influence on the distribution of travel times than the soil matrix dispersive properties, leading to much larger travel times in catchments with dry climate. Moreover, the mean travel time was found to be independent of scale above a characteristic upstream contributing area corresponding to approximately 200 km².