Genetically modified hydrographs: what can grass genetics do for temperate catchment hydrology?
✍ Scribed by C. J. A. Macleod; A. Binley; S. L. Hawkins; M. W. Humphreys; L. B. Turner; W. R. Whalley; P. M. Haygarth
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2007
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 181 KB
- Volume
- 21
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0885-6087
- DOI
- 10.1002/hyp.6780
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✦ Synopsis
Increasing socio-economic and climate related pressures on catchments are reducing their ability to deliver clean and plentiful water. Grasslands, which include rangelands and pasturelands, cover a large proportion of our land surface and have high return frequencies of overland and interflows, which, because of the high flow energies, result in the transfer of a range of soluble and particulate pollutants to surface water bodies (e.g. Haygarth et al., 2005Haygarth et al., , 2006)). In temperate European catchments, increased volumes and intensity of winter rainfall are predicted, leading to raised levels of erosive runoff. Rising demand for biomass and food production will require that agricultural land delivers high levels of production as well as environmental services, including high quality water that does not contribute to flooding.
Hydrologists have long been aware of the pivotal role of vegetation in regulating and buffering the hydrological cycle. At the single plant scale, biophysical changes in soil hydraulic properties due to root activity have been observed (Whalley et al., 2005). Recent exciting advances in grass genetics and breeding may now provide an opportunity to actively select grass traits that have beneficial effects on hillslope and catchment hydrology (Humphreys et al., 2006
) and thus produce desired environmental outcomes. In this commentary, we examine the potential for grass genetics and breeding to modify hillslope and catchment hydrographs from the perspective of a newly formed interdisciplinary project team of plant geneticists, soil scientists and hydrologists. Our hypothesis is that grasses can be genetically selected to reduce the hydrological energy of grassland dominated catchments. Can advances in molecular genetics really offer potential to change the timing and shape of a hydrograph?