Vegetation for Elder Creek hovering over the watershed.

Updated June 19, 2007.

The goal of Desktop Watersheds (DW) is to discover and advance the fundamental relations needed to predict landscape evolution and to model the coupling of ecosystem, landscape, and land-use dynamics. It is an approach that motivates fieldwork with hypotheses derived from topography, and it captures and integrates the findings for prediction.

Research  | Publications | Resources |  Ripple (available soon) 

Researchers in the DW collaboration are iterating between maps, experimental data, and theory to generate dynamic mosaics of prediction across landscapes, with scaling empiricisms that predict responses of interest over finite regions but break down where thresholds in environmental conditions tip landscape dynamics or food web interactions and ecosystem responses into new regimes. Included here are the three grand challenges for DW:

1. Develop mechanistic understanding of the processes driving erosion and deposition that shape landscapes.
2. Discover the linkages between physical, chemical, and biological processes.
3. Apply understanding to the prediction of the linkages between land use and ecosystem response to guide management decisions.

We focus these questions on channels and the watersheds that feed them.

Contact Information:
Collin Bode
Desktop Watersheds Project Manager
Power Lab
Department of Integrative Biology
3060 Valley Life Sciences Building #3140
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-3140
(510) 643-7426