Hyporheic zone hydrologic science: A historical account of its emergence and a prospectus

Abstract

The hyporheic zone, defined by shallow subsurface pathways through river beds and banks beginning and ending at the river, is an integral and unique component of fluvial systems. It hosts myriad hydrologically controlled processes that are potentially coupled in complex ways. Understanding these processes and the connections between them is critical since these processes are not only important locally but integrate to impact increasingly larger scale biogeochemical functioning of the river corridor up to the river network scale. Thus, the hyporheic zone continues to be a growing research focus for many hydrologists for more than half the history of Water Resources Research. This manuscript partly summarizes the historical development of hyporheic zone hydrologic science as gleaned from papers published in Water Resources Research, from the birth of the concept of the hyporheic zone as a hydrologic black box (sometimes referred to as transient storage zone), to its adolescent years of being torn between occasionally competing research perspectives of interrogating the hyporheic zone from a surface or subsurface view, to its mature emergence as an interdisciplinary research field that employs the wide array of state-of-the-art tools available to the modern hydrologist. The field is vibrant and moving in the right direction of addressing critical fundamental and applied questions with no clear end in sight in its growth. There are exciting opportunities for scientists that are able to tightly link the allied fields of geology, geomorphology, hydrology, geochemistry, and ecology to tackle the many open problems in hyporheic zone science.

Bayesian Monitoring Design for Streambed Heat Tracing: Numerical Simulation and Sandbox Experiments

“…The 2D model domain is shown in Figure 2. To ensure the bottom can receive the temperature signal from the streambed, the vertical scale of the model domain was chosen as 0.5 m, while the horizontal scale was chosen as 1 m, which was also adopted in previous studies (Cardenas andWilson 2007a, 2007b;Cardenas et al 2008).…”

“…It is well recognized that the heterogeneity of hydraulic conductivities significantly impacts flow and transport processes in shallow streambeds Liu and Chui 2017). Thus, for better management, conservation and restoration of riverine ecosystems, it is essential to accurately characterize the heterogeneous streambed (Cardenas 2015;Jiménez et al 2015). Due to difficulties in measuring the hydraulic conductivity directly, there are increasing interests in applying inverse modeling methods to estimate it from indirect measurements of state variables in groundwater hydrology (Zhu et al 2017;Lan et al 2018;Liao et al 2018;Zha et al 2018).…”

Simulation of less‐mobile porosity dynamics in contrasting sediment water interface porous media

“…The hyporheic zone is often considered as a homogeneous “black‐box” by common solute transport and transient storage models that are calibrated using in‐stream tracer experiments (Briggs, Day‐Lewis, Zarnetske, & Harvey, ; Cardenas, ; J. W. Harvey, Böhlke, Voytek, Scott, & Tobias, ). However, heterogeneities caused by variations of grain sizes as well as lenses and layers with different permeability are common in the natural alluvial sediments that make up SWI porous media (Olsen & Townsend, ).…”

“…These coupled but functionally different porosity domains result in a spectrum of solute residence times in the hyporheic zone that may show power‐law distribution in channel return flow (Aubeneau, Hanrahan, Bolster, & Tank, ; Cardenas, ; Cardenas, Cook, Jiang, & Traykovski, ; Gooseff, McKnight, Runkel, & Vaughn, ; Haggerty, Wondzell, & Johnson, ). Residence time of water and solute directly impacts contaminant transport, microbial reactions, aquifer management, and the implementation of remediation techniques (Briggs et al, ; Cardenas, ; Culkin, Singha, & Day‐Lewis, ). Simplified stream‐based solute transport models that assume homogeneity for the hyporheic zone cannot capture the complex exchange between mobile and less‐mobile domains, which can have a substantial effect on the solute transport and reactive processes (Day‐Lewis & Singha, ; Gao et al, ; Singha, Day‐Lewis, & Lane, ).…”

It's sedimentary, my dear Watson : implications of watershed processes on the sediment fingerprinting approach

“…The movement of ground water into the stream (i.e., gaining streams) will result in a change in stream water chemistry and the fingerprint of sediment will adjust (e.g., adsorption/desorption of exchangeable ions) to compensate for the change in environmental conditions. Furthermore, the hyporheic zone is a hotspot for biogeochemical processes (e.g., denitrification) because of high solute residence times and steep gradients in dissolved oxygen and pH (Cardenas 2015). Therefore, there is a high potential for modification of fingerprint properties in sediment stored in the hyporheic zone.…”