As extreme climatic events such as droughts are becoming more frequent and demands for water are increasing world-wide, it is projected that as many as 3.5 billion people could experience water scarcity by 2025. In Australia, changes in climate and land use as well as multi-year droughts, such as the Millennium Drought that ended in 2009, have led to water shortages, particularly in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). The MDB is a large (>1million km2) semi-arid basin that experiences conflict over water resources and accounts for over 40% of Australia’s gross value in agricultural production. In this forum, Dr. Tulbure will discuss examples of her group’s work that provide a cohesive quantification of spatiotemporal surface water dynamics during a period of extreme hydroclimatic variability in the MDB and the impact of these dynamics on landscape ecological processes.