How math helps us predict water flows in forests

Zabret, Katarina (author), Šraj, Mojca (author), Van Stan, John T. (author)

Water flows through forests in many ways, so it is difficult to understand and predict where and when it will flow. Understanding how water flows through forests is important, as it affects many of the services that forests offer to people, like lumber for houses and cleaner air. Water scientists (called hydrologists) have a way to reduce the complex water flow of a forest into something we can explain with simple math: they turn forests into buckets! In this article, we describe a forest “water park,” where leafy and bark buckets fill and empty into each other or onto the forest floor. These buckets help us describe and predict water flows in forests using simple arithmetic and statistics. We focus on the flow of rainwater as it drains through the canopy to the ground, contributing water needed for tree growth and filling the groundwater that we drink.

• Language: English
• Keywords: hydrology, rainfall interception, throughfall, stemflow
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.03 - Other scientific articles
• Organization: FGG - Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2022
• Number of pages: 8 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 10, art. 762009
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-137055
• UDC: 556.1
• ISSN on article: 2296-6846
• DOI: 10.3389/frym.2022.762009
• COBISS.SI-ID: 106891779
• Publication date in RUL: 31.05.2022

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Frontiers for young minds
• Shortened title: Front. young minds
• Publisher: Frontiers Media
• ISSN: 2296-6846
• COBISS.SI-ID: 4908111

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: hidrologija, prestrežene padavine, prepuščene padavine