In recent decades, the ecohydrology discipline was developed to provide theoretical and technical foundations for the protection and restoration of complex ecological systems (e.g., mountains, rivers, forests, farmlands, and lakes), and to further ecological civilization construction and green development in China. In this study, the progress and challenges of the ecohydrology discipline are elaborated, and the future development directions are proposed according to international scientific frontiers and national ecological civilization construction demands. Overall, the main discipline directions are to develop new ecohydrological monitoring methods, to comprehensively understand ecohydrological mechanisms and their basic theories, to promote integration of multi-scale and multi-variable models by considering both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and to encourage multidisciplinary integration, particularly with the social sciences. Furthermore, the future research interests in China include: combining multi-source information, constructing comprehensive monitoring systems, studying spatiotemporal patterns of key ecohydrological variables and their variation characteristics, developing integrated models of ecological, hydrological, and economic processes, estimating their uncertainty; and conducting interdisciplinary studies that include the natural and social sciences. The application prospects in China are further explored for a variety of ecosystems, including forests, grasslands, rivers, lakes, wetlands, farmlands, and cities. This study will provide a reference to support the development of the ecohydrology discipline in China, and will provide a solid theoretical and technical foundation for the implementation of national ecological civilization construction.

Dual factors of climate and human on the hydrological process are reflected not only in changes in the spatiotemporal distribution of water resource amounts but also in the various characteristics of river flow regimes. Isolating and quantifying their contributions to these hydrological alterations helps us to comprehensively understand the response mechanism and patterns of hydrological process to the two kinds of factors. Here we develop a general framework using hydrological model and 33 indicators to describe hydrological process and quantify the impact from climate and human. And we select the Upper Minjiang River (UMR) as a case to explore its feasibility. The results indicate that our approach successfully recognizes the characteristics of river flow regimes in different scenarios and quantitatively separates the climate and human contributions to multi-dimensional hydrological alterations. Among these indicators, 26 of 33 indicators decrease over the past half-century (1961-2012) in the UMR, with change rates ranging from 1.3% to 33.2%, and the human impacts are the dominant factor affecting hydrological processes, with an average relative contribution rate of 58.6%. Climate change causes an increase in most indicators, with an average relative contribution rate of 41.4%. Specifically, changes in precipitation and reservoir operation may play a considerable role in inducing these alterations. The findings in this study help us better understand the response mechanism of hydrological process under changing environment and is conducive to climate change adaptation, water resource planning and ecological construction.

This study uses two forms of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), namely the PDSI_TH (potential evapotranspiration estimated-by the Thornthwaite equation) and the PDSI_PM (potential evapotranspiration estimated by the FAO Penman-Monteith equation), to characterize the meteorological drought trends during 1960-2016 in the Loess Plateau (LP) and its four subregions. By designing a series of numerical experiments, we mainly investigated various climatic factors' contributions to the drought trends at annual, summer, and autumn time scales. Overall, the drying trend in the PDSI_TH is much larger than that in the PDSI_PM. The former is more sensitive to air temperature than precipitation, while the latter is the most sensitive to precipitation among all meteorological factors. Increasing temperature results in a decreasing trend (drying) in the PDSI_TH, which is further aggravated by decreasing precipitation, jointly leading to a relatively severe drying trend. For the PDSI_PM that considers more comprehensive climatic factors, the drying trend is partly counteracted by the declining wind speed and solar radiation. Therefore, the PDSI_PM ultimately shows a much smaller drying trend in the past decades.

Climate change and human activity can cause remarkable hydrological variation. Traits of hydrological series such as runoff before and after the change points could be significantly different, so the calculation of instream ecological water requirements (EWRs) is confronted with more challenges. Taking the Xitiaoxi River (XTXR) in the upper reach of the Taihu Lake Basin as an example, this paper investigates the calculation of EWRs using the range of variability approach (RVA) under changing environment. The change point diagnosis of the natural and observed runoff series are conducted for XTXR. Then, differences in the hydrological alternation indicators and instream EWRs processes obtained from various daily runoff series are compared. It was found that the natural and observed annual runoff series in XTXR from 1957 to 2018 both show significant variations, and the change points are in 2007 and 1999 respectively. If runoff data before the change points or all runoff data are used, the instream EWRs obtained from natural runoff are significantly lower than those obtained from the observed runoff. At the monthly time step, EWRs differences within a year mainly occurred from May to August. Also, calculation results of the instream EWRs are strongly related to the selected period of runoff series. The EWRs obtained using runoff series after the change points have rather acute fluctuation within a year. Therefore, when the RVA method is used under changing environment, the instream EWRs should be prudently determined by comparing different calculation results on the basis of river runoff restoration and variability analysis. To a certain extent, this paper enriches our understanding about the hydrological method for EWRs estimation, and proposes new ideas for future research on EWRs.