Revisión: De una conceptualización multiescala a un sistema de clasificación para ecosistemas dependientes de agua subterránea interior

Abstract

Aquifers provide water, nutrients and energy with various patterns for many aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs) are increasingly recognized for their ecological and socio-economic values. The current knowledge of the processes governing the ecohydrological functioning of inland GDEs is reviewed, in order to assess the key drivers constraining their viability. These processes occur both at the watershed and emergence scale. Recharge patterns, geomorphology, internal geometry and geochemistry of aquifers control water availability and nutritive status of groundwater. The interface structure between the groundwater system and the biocenoses may modify the groundwater features by physicochemical or biological processes, for which biocenoses need to adapt. Four major types of aquifer-GDE interface have been described: springs, surface waters, peatlands and terrestrial ecosystems. The ecological roles of groundwater are conditioned by morphological characteristics for spring GDEs, by the hyporheic zone structure for surface waters, by the organic soil structure and volume for peatland GDEs, and by water-table fluctuation and surface floods in terrestrial GDEs. Based on these considerations, an ecohydrological classification system for GDEs is proposed and applied to Central and Western-Central Europe, as a basis for modeling approaches for GDEs and as a tool for groundwater and landscape management.

Nutrient dynamics, transfer and retention along the aquatic continuum from land to ocean: towards integration of ecological and biogeochemical models

“…It will be impossible to model this complexity in detail at the basin scale. Approaches that deal with the small-scale heterogeneity in a typological way are promising for incorporation in supralocal models (Bertrand et al, 2012;Dahl et al, 2007).…”

Observed groundwater temperature response to recent climate change

“…Furthermore, groundwater-sourced cold-water plumes within river mainstreams are known to provide thermal refuge for threatened cold-water fish (e.g., Ebersole et al, 2001;Breau et al, 2007), and questions have arisen regarding the sustainability of these groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs) in a warming climate (Deitchman and Loheide, 2012). The current lack of knowledge regarding the thermal vulnerability of GDEs to the climate-changeinduced warming of shallow GWT has been highlighted as a research gap in several recent studies (e.g., Bertrand et al, 2012;Mayer, 2012;Kanno et al, 2014).…”

Continental hydrosystem modelling: the concept of nested stream–aquifer interfaces

“…Indeed, they have difficulties to fulfill the requirements of, for instance, the European WFD, especially for providing guidelines towards a good ecological status of both surface water bodies and subsurface water bodies. State-of-the-art coupled surface-subsurface models nowadays fail to integrate ecohydrological concepts based on functionalities of morphological units (Bertrand et al, 2012;Dahl et al, 2007), mostly because they are not able yet to integrate the multi-scale nature of the stream-aquifer interfaces into a holistic view of the system. Consequently, innovative methodologies for assessing stream-aquifer exchanges at the regional and continental scales need to be developed, which is a challenging issue for modellers Graillot et al, 2014).…”