Southern Research Station

Title: Water budgets of two forested watersheds in South Carolina

Author: Sun, Ge; Lu, Jianbiao; Gartner, David L.; Miwa, Masato; Trettin, Carl C.

Date: 2000

Source: Awra's Annual Water Resources Conference

Description: Wetland protection, restoration and management require detail information of the water budgets for a particular system. Relatively undisturbed systems with long-term hydrologic records are extremely valuable for developing reference wetlands and detecting effects of management. Two forested flatwoods watersheds in the lower coastal plain of South Carolina have been monitored by the USDA Forest Service since 1976 with a primary objective to study the effects of forest management (prescribed burning) on water quality. This study synthesized the accumulated hydrologic data including streamflow and shallow groundwater table with a goal to develop long-term monthly and annual water budgets for the two watersheds. Measured hydro-metrological data and a monthly time step computer simulation model, MRSWARM, were used for analysis. This study found that long-term annual evapotranspiration for undisturbed mature forests was about 913 mm or 75% of annual precipitation. On a hydrology-averaged day, about 25% of the forested wetland watersheds was in aerobic condition and over 50% had a water table within 40 cm from land surface.

Keywords: wetland hydrology, water budgets, flatwoods

View and Print this Publication (295 KB)

Pristine Version:  An uncaptured or "pristine" version of this publication is available. It has not been subjected to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and therefore does not have any errors in the text. However it is a larger file size and some people may experience long download times. The "pristine" version of this publication is available here:

View and Print the PRISTINE copy of this Publication (436 KB)

Publication Notes: 

• We recommend that you also print this page and attach it to the printout of the article, to retain the full citation information.
• This article was written and prepared by U.S. Government employees on official time, and is therefore in the public domain.

 Get the latest version of the Adobe Acrobat reader or Acrobat Reader for Windows with Search and Accessibility

Citation

Sun, Ge; Lu, Jianbiao; Gartner, David L.; Miwa, Masato; Trettin, Carl C.  2000.  Water budgets of two forested watersheds in South Carolina.   Awra's Annual Water Resources Conference