Basin studies and instrumentation

The establishment of instrumented catchments has been vital to the development of knowledge of the hydrological impacts of land use on water resources. This chapter describes the study of the Plynlimon catchments in some detail. It continues with discussion of work on catchments in East Africa and on some of the other small basins investigated by Hydrological Research Unit (HRU)/Institute of Hydrology (IH). The chapter looks at the sensors, the means of logging their outputs and the techniques developed to measure the in-basin variables. Some of these have been deployed in other studies to gather data for problem solving across the range of water orientated projects. It discusses the main findings of two groups of experimental studies, namely: water balance changes over a plantation forest cycle in the United Kingdom, and hydrological changes due to land use conversion from native vegetation to commercial farming in East Africa.