Watershed Function
Science Focus Area
Functional Traits and Watershed Resilience
The Watershed Function SFA is an integrated, multi-laboratory project focused on how mountainous watersheds respond to severe weather events and environmental shifts, such as snow droughts.
Photo Credit: Jeremy Snyder (LBNL)
What is the Watershed Function SFA?
The Watershed Function SFA is an integrated, multi-laboratory project focused on how mountainous watersheds respond to severe weather events and environmental shifts, such as snow droughts.
The SFA investigates the natural mechanisms that allow watersheds to respond and recover from these stressors, tracing impacts from forest canopies to deep bedrock and its critical stores of groundwater. This research helps predict how vital ecosystems adapt over time and track how they retain and release water, nutrients, and other essential elements.
Why Study Mountainous Watersheds?
Mountainous watersheds act as the "water towers of the world," providing the foundational resources necessary for clean water, food, and energy security, for example, hydropower capacity and grid reliability. Overlapping environmental pressures, such as frequent snow droughts, shifting precipitation patterns, earlier snowmelt, and wildfire, are reshaping how watersheds behave.
A deeper understanding of these systems is urgently needed, as fluctuations in mountain water cycles are projected to cause trillion-dollar economic impacts across the Western United States in the coming decades.
Lead Institutions
Partners
