The first catchment water balance: new insights into Pierre Perrault, his perceptual model and his peculiar catchment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pierre Perrault and his 1674 book De l’Origine des Fontaines are widely acknowledged in hydrology as the first formal articulation of the catchment water balance based on field data. Many summaries of his work have now been written, but few of these summaries have examined Perrault’s perceptual model in detail and none that we are aware of have gone back to his study catchment to collect new data in which to frame these historic findings in a modern context. Here we report new insights (with re-calculations of some of his analyses) into Perrault’s work, his perceptual model of streamflow generation and his rather peculiar 119 km2 headwater catchment of the Seine River basin. We show the uncertainty of his flow and catchment area estimates, some errors in perception about hydrological flowpaths and new age estimates for the spring-fed site where he worked. Despite these modern criticisms and updates, Perrault’s place in hydrological history is secure: he was the first to bring quantitative analysis to fundamental questions of the terrestrial water cycle.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".