The Zhurucay Ecohydrological Observatory was established in 2009 by the then so-called Group of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Cuenca. The objective of its creation was to have a natural research laboratory to study the hydrological functioning of Andean mountain basins and the interrelations between aquatic and forest ecology with the water cycle.
Zhurucay was designed as a nested monitoring network (9 streams), whose main catchment has an extension of 7.5 km2 at the outlet. This allows knowing the distributed generation of flows and associate them with different factors such as vegetation cover or soils, or storm types. It ranges between 3200 and 3900 m a.s.l, in an Andean Páramo ecosystem. It is located about 85 km from the city of Cuenca, in southeast direction. The hydrological divide of Zhurucay is in fact the continental water divide.
Zhurucay has been the basis of many projects about hydrological processes, hydrometeorology, tracer hydrology, hillslope hydrology, aquatic ecology, soil chemistry and physics, micrometeorology and, in general, ecohydrology.
The observatory has the following permanent equipment:
- Hydrology: Discharge is monitored in 9 micro catchments with areas from 0.25 to 7.5 km2.
- Meteorology: Two Campbell Sci. Meteorological stations that record temperature and relative humidity, precipitation, atmospheric pressure, wind direction and speed, solar radiation, long wave net radiation and short wave net radiation (3780 and 3320 m a.s.l).
- Rainfall: We have 5 permanent rain gauges in the basin and during experimental periods a dense network composed of twelve rain gauges has been installed. Additionally we have a laser disdrometer and recently several fog gauges.
- Hydrogeochemistry: A quality monitoring system for precipitation water, soils, flows and springs using isotopic tracers and nutrients has been implemented.
- Subsurface flow: Detailed monitoring of the moisture dynamics in the soil at different depths at the hillslope scale using thirty-eight TDR Campbell Scientific sensors.
- Energy Balance: Two sets of energy balance sensors; each set is composed of a high precision net radiometer, two heat flow plates, four thermocouples and a soil moisture sensor.
- Micrometeorology: A LICOR Eddy Covariance station.