Oases of the future? Springs as potential hydrologic refugia in drying climates
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Abstract
Climate-change predictions in some water-limited regions, such as the southwestern US and central Australia, fore-cast increasing aridity and longer, hotter, and more frequent drought events (Chiew et al. 2011; Ahmadalipour et al. 2017). These projections and recent severe droughts have increas- ingly motivated efforts to find and conserve ecohydrologic refugia: that is, mesic microenvironments that are relatively buffered from climate change (McLaughlin et al. 2017). Some groundwater systems provide such buffering via water storage in deep aquifers for centuries or millennia, slow responses to precipitation changes, and relative protection from evapotran- spiration (Cuthbert and Ashley 2014; Davis et al. 2017).
