Year-round mountainous watershed characterization through digital surface model Time-Lapses: An hillslope ecosystem understanding

Improving understanding and modelling of terrestrial systems requires advances in measuring and quantifying interactions among subsurface, land surface and vegetation processes over relevant spatiotemporal scales. Such advances are important to quantify natural and managed ecosystem behaviors, as well as to predict how watershed systems respond to increasingly frequent hydrological perturbations, such as droughts, floods and early snowmelt.

Our study focuses on the joint use of UAV-based multi-spectral aerial imaging, and ground-based geophysical methods (incl., electrical and electromagnetic imaging) to quantify interactions between above and below ground compartments of the East River Watershed in the Upper Colorado River Basin. We evaluate linkages between metrics extracted from digital surface and terrain elevation models (incl., slope, wetness index) and vegetation properties (incl., greenness, plant type) in a 500 x 500 m hillslope-floodplain subsystem of the watershed.