Résumé
Assessing the recharge of underground hydrosystems remains an obstacle to understand their hydrologeological functioning. During a rain event, which part of the rain is evapotranspired? And how much is temporarily stored within the soil? These questions are particularly relevant in heterogeneous media such as karst hydrosystems. Currently, the models used to compute recharge of karst hydrosystems, rely on simplistic formulations of evapotranspiration that do not account for vegetation functioning. In this study, we used the vegetation process based model CASTANEA [Davi et al., 2005 ; Dufrêne et al., 2005], which is designed to compute water transfer between soil, plant and atmosphere. We computed effective infiltration (an index of recharge) with CASTANEA and with other classical approach (based on precipitation minus ETP), and for a well-documented holm oak site in Provence [Carrière et al., 2013 ; Carrière et al., 2015]. Our results provide evidences that effective infiltration computed with CASTANEA yield more satisfactory correlation with measured outflow than simulations based on the classical approach. Our results provide a promising way to improve the simulation of karst hydrosystem recharge.