We know a lot about resistance to flow through vegetation, but not in the patchily vegetated dryland context. This is a tricky problem for a few reasons: patchy landscapes with different surface roughness and infiltration rates in bare soil areas.

This paper assessed whether different representations of surface roughness could be calibrated to represent the same hillslope. For a range of realistic storm and hillslope conditions, we found that different resistance formulations produce similar hydrologic outcomes if the resistance coefficients are appropriately calibrated.