STATION FOR THE OBSERVATORIES OF THE CRITICAL ZONE APPLICATIONS AND RESEARCH (OZCAR)
Measured parameters
The ERORUN observatory is based at 3 sites – Plaine des Fougères, Rivière des Pluies and the University of Reunion – and carries out around forty quantitative observations dedicated to all the hydrological processes of a torrential watershed on Réunion Island. At each site, there are different stations corresponding to different hydrosystem compartments or river levels:
On the Plaine des fougères site, altitude 1300m
- A climatic station
- A soil station
- A subsoil station
- A river station
On the Rivière des Pluies site
- A river station at 100m altitude
- A waterfall station
- A rainfall station at 400m altitude
- A river station at 435m altitude
On the University of Reunion site
- A subsoil station
- A climatic station
This layout and organization of observations in ERORUN makes it possible to integrate all processes within the various compartments of a watershed’s hydrosystem (river, slopes, forest, soil and subsoil). Such a configuration implies a wide variety of measured parameters, types of acquisition and associated processing methods. A few families of parameters can be distinguished as data collections:
- climatic: data from sensors mounted on data acquisition units or stand-alone sensors, including rainfall, atmospheric pressure, air temperature, realtive air humidity, solar radiation and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), wind, fog, etc.
- hydrometric: data from sensors mounted on data acquisition units or stand-alone sensors, including piezometric water levels, water temperature and conductivity, leaf moisture, soil moisture, soil water content, moss weight variation, etc.
- chemical: data obtained from river water sampling and laboratory analysis: water temperature, pH, conductivity, major ions and isotopic analysis (∂18O/∂O).
The observations carried out within ERORUN and the cross-disciplinary scientific questions between hydrology and tropical forest biology naturally lead to a mutualization and collaboration with the Station Forestière STAFOR of OSU-Réunion.
