Global streamflow characteristics

"Streamflow characteristics offer some of the most appropriate and useful indicators for assessing watershed health. They are extremely sensitive to human activities and reflect weather and climate conditions, vegetation and soil type, land characteristics, and human use. Common human activities, such as increasing the number of roads and parking lots, change the timing and strength of runoff events resulting in "flashy" systems. Such hydrologic variation shapes the biotic diversity within stream ecosystems by controlling critical habitat conditions." (National Park Service 2018.)

Sources

National Park Service. 2018. “Streamflow Characteristics Monitoring.” 2018. https://www.nps.gov/im/sfan/streamflow.htm.

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Person

Nelson

E. James (Jim) Nelson

Professor of Civil & Construction Engineering at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah

Dr. Nelson is a Professor of Civil & Construction Engineering at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He has been a pioneer in developing geospatial hydrologic modeling and hydroinformatics tools and is the principal developer of the Watershed Modeling System (WMS) which since the 1990’s has been widely disseminated and used for development of hydrologic models and visualization of results. In recent years he and his colleagues at BYU developed Tethys Platform, free and open-source tools that lower the barrier for engineers to create web-applications for hydroinformatics.