The age, or residence time, of water is a fundamental descriptor of catchment hydrology, revealing information about the storage, flow pathways, and source of water in a single integrated measure. While there has been tremendous recent interest in residence time estimation to characterize watersheds, there are relatively few studies that have quantified residence time at the watershed scale, and fewer still that have extended those results beyond single catchments to larger landscape scales. We examined topographic controls on residence time for seven catchments (0.085–62.4 km²) that represent diverse geologic and geomorphic conditions in the western Cascade Mountains of Oregon. Our primary objective was to determine the dominant physical controls on catchment‐scale water residence time and specifically test the hypothesis that residence time is related to the size of the basin. Residence times were estimated by simple convolution models that described the transfer of precipitation isotopic composition to the stream network. We found that base flow mean residence times for exponential distributions ranged from 0.8 to 3.3 years. Mean residence time showed no correlation to basin area (r² < 0.01) but instead was correlated (r² = 0.91) to catchment terrain indices representing the flow path distance and flow path gradient to the stream network. These results illustrate that landscape organization (i.e., topography) rather than basin area controls catchment‐scale transport. Results from this study may provide a framework for describing scale‐invariant transport across climatic and geologic conditions, whereby the internal form and structure of the basin defines the first‐order control on base flow residence time.

Subsurface flow from hillslopes is widely recognized as an important contributor to streamflow generation; however, processes that control how and when hillslopes connect to streams remain unclear. We investigated stream and hillslope runoff dynamics through a wet‐up period in watershed 10 of the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the western Cascades of Oregon where the riparian zone has been removed by debris flows. We examined the controls on hillslope‐stream connectivity on the basis of observations of hydrometric, stable isotope, and applied tracer responses and computed transit times for multiple runoff components for a series of storms during the wet‐up phase of the 2002–2003 winter rainy season. Hillslope discharge was distinctly threshold‐like with a near linear response and average quick flow ratio of 0.58 when antecedent rainfall was greater than 20 mm. Hillslope and stream stormflow varied temporally and showed strong hysteretic relationships. Event water mean transit times (8–34 h) and rapid breakthrough from applied hillslope tracer additions demonstrated that subsurface contributing areas extend far upslope during events. Despite rapid hillslope transport processes during events, soil water and runoff mean transit times during nonstorm conditions were greater than the time scale of storm events. Soil water mean transit times ranged between 10 and 25 days. Hillslope seepage and catchment base flow mean transit times were between 1 and 2 years. We describe a conceptual model that captures variable physical flow pathways, their synchronicity, threshold activation, hysteresis, and transit times through changing antecedent wetness conditions that illustrate the different stages of hillslope and stream connectivity.

A better understanding is needed of how hydrological and biogeochemical processes control dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations and dissolved organic matter (DOM) composition from headwaters downstream to large rivers. We examined a large DOM dataset from the National Water Information System of the US Geological Survey, which represents approximately 100 000 measurements of DOC concentration and DOM composition at many sites along rivers across the United States. Application of quantile regression revealed a tendency towards downstream spatial and temporal homogenization of DOC concentrations and a shift from dominance of aromatic DOM in headwaters to more aliphatic DOM downstream. The DOC concentration–discharge (C-Q) relationships at each site revealed a downstream tendency towards a slope of zero. We propose that despite complexities in river networks that have driven many revisions to the River Continuum Concept, rivers show a tendency towards chemostasis (C-Q slope of zero) because of a downstream shift from a dominance of hydrologic drivers that connect terrestrial DOM sources to streams in the headwaters towards a dominance of instream and near-stream biogeochemical processes that result in preferential losses of aromatic DOM and preferential gains of aliphatic DOM.

We discuss a recent theoretical approach combining catchment‐scale flow and transport processes into a unified framework. The approach is designed to characterize the hydrochemistry of hydrologic systems and to meet the challenges posed by empirical evidence. StorAge Selection functions (SAS) are defined to represent the way catchment storage supplies the outflows with water of different ages, thus regulating the chemical composition of out‐fluxes. Biogeochemical processes are also reflected in the evolving residence time distribution and thus in age‐selection. Here we make the case for the routine use of SAS functions and look forward to areas where further research is needed.