It is often assumed that large shallow water bodies are net sediment nondepositional annually and that if they have nutrient loads from multiple sources, those loads are quickly homogenized before exiting the water bodies. Where this is not the case, it impacts understanding and predicting consequences of nutrient load reductions, both for the water body and for those downstream of it. We applied a three‐dimensional ecological model to a large shallow lake, Lake St. Clair (US/Canada), to quantify the total and dissolved reactive phosphorus (TP and DRP) transport and retention, and construct tributary‐specific relationships between phosphorus load to the lake and the amount of phosphorus that leaves the lake for the three major tributaries. Lake St. Clair is situated between the St. Clair and Detroit rivers, the latter enters Lake Erie. Efforts to reduce Lake Erie's re‐eutrophication requires an understanding of nutrient transport and retention in each of its subwatersheds including those that feed indirectly via Lake St. Clair. We found that over the simulation period, the lake retained a significant portion of TP (17%) and DRP (35%) load and that TP and DRP retention was spatially variable and largely controlled by a combination of lake depth, resuspension, and plankton uptake. Compared to the Clinton and Sydenham rivers, the Thames River contributed a larger proportion of its load to the lake's outflow. However, because the lake's load is dominated by the St. Clair River, 40% reductions of nutrients from those subwatersheds will result in less than a 5% reduction in the load to Lake Erie.

Snow water equivalent (SWE) is one of the most hydrologically important physical properties of a snowpack. The U.S. National Weather Service's Snow Data Assimilation System (SNODAS) provides snow products at high spatial (~1 km2) and temporal (daily) resolution for the contiguous United States and southern Canada. This study evaluated the SNODAS SWE product in the boreal forest, prairie, and Canadian Rockies of western Canada against extensive snow survey measurements. SNODAS was found to work well in sheltered environments, to overestimate SWE under needle‐leaf forests, and to be unable to capture the spatial variation of SWE in windswept prairie and alpine environments. Results indicate that SNODAS SWE accuracy is strongly influenced by the missing blowing snow redistribution and canopy energetics and snow interception and sublimation processes in the mass balance calculations of the SNODAS model and by erroneous precipitation data forcing the model. To demonstrate how errors caused by missing processes can be corrected in areas with low assimilation frequency, SNODAS data were assimilated into a physically based hydrological model created using the modular Cold Region Hydrological Modelling (CRHM) platform that includes blowing and intercepted snow redistribution and subcanopy melt energetic processes. This approach decreased the overestimation of SWE compared to SNODAS from 135 to 79% in the study area and suggests that snow assimilation modeled SWE quality can be improved if snow redistribution, sublimation, and subcanopy melt processes are incorporated.

Watershed urbanization and stormwater management (SWM) alter the hydrologic processes of rivers. Although differences have been documented in channel morphology and sediment yield pre‐ and posturbanization, little is known about how the modified hydrology affects grain‐scale bedload transport dynamics. This study aims to characterize the bedload sediment transport regime of three rivers with different hydrologic settings: rural, urban with no SWM, and urban with peak‐shaving SWM. The rivers are “semi‐alluvial,” characterized by an alluvial layer over a cohesive till. Bedload transport was monitored using tracer stones over 3 years. Hydrograph characteristics of the streams fit with what is expected in urban and SWM systems, and the rural stream has an episodic transport regime typical of gravel‐bed rivers. Entrainment thresholds are not detectably impacted by the semi‐alluvial bed cover, but travel lengths of grains relative to their size are longer than in alluvial gravel‐bed streams. Downstream displacement rates of particles up to the D90 are accelerated in the urban river due to more frequent mobilization rather than increased event‐based travel lengths and may explain channel enlargement. SWM decreases the mobility and travel lengths of particles below those in the rural system, which is combined with channel narrowing, and the loss of bed forms suggests a shift toward a competence‐limited transport regime. This new regime is a result of reduced shear stresses that are insufficient to transport coarse material. This study presents empirical evidence of the effects of watershed urbanization and SWM on bedload transport and provides recommendations for process‐based river management strategies.