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Observed scale effects of runoff on hillslopes and small watersheds derive from complex interactions of time-varying rainfall rates with runoff, infiltration and macro-and microtopographic structures. A little studied aspect of scale effects is the concept of water depth-dependent infiltration. For semi-arid range-land it has been demonstrated that mounds underneath shrubs have a high infiltrability and lower lying compacted or stony inter-shrub areas have a lower infiltrability. It is hypothesized that runoff accumulation further downslope leads to increased water depth, inundating high infiltrability areas, which increases the area-averaged infiltration rate. A model was developed that combines the concepts of water depth-dependent infiltration, partial contributing area under variable rainfall intensity, and the Green-Ampt theory for point-scale infiltration. The model was applied to rainfall simulation data and natural rainfall-runoff data from a small sub-watershed (0.4 ha) of the Walnut Gulch Experimental Watershed in the semi-arid US Southwest. Its performance to reproduce observed hydrographs was compared to that of a conventional Green-Ampt model assuming complete inundation sheet flow, with runon infiltration, which is infiltration of runoff onto pervious downstream areas. Parameters were derived from rainfall simulations and from watershed-scale calibration directly from the rainfall-runoff events. The performance of the water depth-dependent model was better than that of the conventional model on the scale of a rainfall simulator plot, but on the scale of a small watershed the performance of both model types was similar. We believe that the proposed model contributes to a less scale-dependent way of modeling runoff and erosion on the hillslope-scale. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.