Ecohydrology of Surface and Groundwater Dependent Systems: Concepts, Methods and Recent Developments

Abstract

This volume presents a series of manuscripts that outline recent advances in the emerging field of Ecohydrology. Ecohydrology can be described as the science that seeks to describe the hydrological mechanisms that underlie ecological patterns and processes at different scales. We live in a time when the boundaries between many scientific disciplines are becoming blurred. Indeed, with increasing pressures on the environment there is a strong incentive to manage the environment as ecosystems and this requires collaboration between the disciplines. Many disciplines are now being brought together to solve environmental problems. Interdisciplinary science involves the "explicit joining of two or more areas of understanding into a single conceptual-empirical structure". Integration of disciplines in this way can be done along additive or extractive lines. The additive case is where two areas of study are combined, more or less intact, into a new composite understanding; in the extractive case, by contrast, different areas of study provide components that are fused to yield a new understanding. Both processes are used in Ecohydrology, depending on the nature of the problem at hand and the state of knowledge in the different disciplines. In the science of Ecohydrology, where the investigator seeks to unravel mutual interactions between the hydrological cycle and ecosystems at different scales, additive studies have dominated. Despite acceleration in the number of research publications in the area of Ecohydrology since the 1980s, few have been extractive in nature. Thus, the case can be made that development of new paradigms within this emerging discipline has been restricted.