H010-0016
Is our finger on the pulse? Assessing placement bias of the global river gauge network

Monday, 7 December 2020
Poster
George H. Allen, Texas A&M University College Station, College Station, TX, United States, Julian D Olden, University of Washington, School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences, Seattle, WA, United States, Corey Krabbenhoft, University at Buffalo, College of Arts and Sciences and RENEW Institute, Buffalo, NY, United States, Peirong Lin, University of Texas, Austin, TX, United States, Margaret Shanafield, Flinders University, Science and Engineering, Bedford Park, SA, Australia, Ken M Fritz, USEPA, Cincinnati, OH, United States, C. Nathan Jones, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, United States, Walter K Dodds, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, United States, Catherin Franklin, Texas A&M University College Station, Geography, College Station, TX, United States, Rebecca L Hale, Idaho State University, Biological Sciences, Pocatello, ID, United States, Samuel C Zipper, University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI, United States, Adam S Ward, Indiana University, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Bloomington, IN, United States, Thibault Datry, INRAE Lyon, Villeurbanne Cedex, France, Hylke Beck, Princeton University, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton, NJ, United States, John Christopher Hammond, U.S. Geological Survey, Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Water Science Center, Catonsville, MD, United States, Amy J Burgin, University of Nebraska Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, United States, Sarah Godsey, Idaho State University, Department of Geosciences, Idaho Falls, ID, United States, Ryan Burrows, The University of Melbourne, Burnley Campus, School of Ecosystem and Forest Science, Burnley, Australia, Margaret A Zimmer, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States, Katie H Costigan, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA, United States, Meryl Mims, Virginia Tech University, Department of Biological Sciences, Blacksburg, VA, United States, Albert Ruhi, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States, Amanda G. DelVecchia, Flathead Lake Biological Station, Polson, MT, United States and Daniel C Allen, University of Oklahoma Norman Campus, Biology, Norman, OK, United States
Abstract:
River gauges that measure flow are paramount for understanding the function and management of freshwater and coastal systems. Globally, river gauges are sparsely distributed along Earth’s rivers raising the question of whether this sample of monitoring stations is representative of the hydrological, morphological, and environmental diversity of fluvial systems. Here we evaluate the extent to which the available global river gauge network (n=17,406) accurately represents the diversity of rivers globally. We determine whether the placement of gauges captures the true variability of river system attributes, including river flow regime, channel morphology, river size, prevailing physiographic conditions, and anthropogenic stressors. In particular, we focus on the bias of gauges in terms of their placement on perennial vs. non-perennial river types. We compiled numerous geospatial attributes from the following global datasets: MERIT Hydro (Yamazaki et al., 2019), GRADES (Lin et al., 2019), HydroATLAS (Linke et al., 2019), GloRiC (Dallaire et al., 2018), and a large international compilation of river gauges (Beck et al., 2020). By applying multivariate statistical analyses, we assess the extent to which the global gauge network is representative of the breadth of attributes that characterize the global population of rivers. Of all the attributes considered in this analysis, gauge placement is the most biased towards perennial rivers, consistently under representing the abundance of non-perennial river types across environments. We also find that gauged reaches overrepresent large, low-gradient rivers, cropland/pastoral landscapes, and regulated river reaches. The results of this analysis point to critical bias inherent in gauge-based analyses of river systems and can be useful when considering the strategic placement of new river gauges.
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