Dr. Marianela Fader from ICWRGC collaborated with another group of authors to demonstrate that multiple-cropping and cropland expansion in Brazil do not only affect agricultural yields but also water productivity.
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“The effects of cropping intensity and cropland expansion of Brazilian soybean production on green water flows”
Water is not only rain, rivers and lakes. Water is fundamentally related to the landscape, food production, biodiversity and ecosystem services. Dr. Marianela Fader from ICWRGC collaborated with French researchers to give ecologists guidance on using land-use and land-cover change scenarios to generate biodiversity and ecosystem services scenarios.
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“What ecologists should know before using land-use/cover change projections for biodiversity and ecosystem service assessments”
On 17 November 2020, the First Mediterranean Assessment Report from the “Mediterranean Experts on Climate and Environmental Change” was posted online. The report titled “Climate and Environmental Change in the Mediterranean Basin – Current Situation and Risks for the Future” has been established by 190 scientists from 25 countries. ICWRGC’s Dr. Marianela Fader is one of the Coordinating Lead Authors of the chapter “Water”. A brief version of the full report is available as a so-called “Summary for Policy Makers” (SPM).
In the water sector, less precipitation and surface runoff, higher evaporation and an increasing need for irrigation as well as more frequent droughts and user conflicts are to be expected. Climate warming and less rainfall reduce groundwater recharge and deteriorate its quality in coastal zones owing to saltwater intrusion, sea level rise and human overexploitation.
In a new publication “Importance of Spatial Resolution on Global Groundwater Modelling” by Reinecke et al. in a special issue of Groundwater, the authors explore the difficulties in modelling groundwater on a global scale. Global gradient-based groundwater models are a new endeavour for hydrologists wishing to improve global hydrological models. In particular, the integration of such groundwater models enhances the simulation of exchange flows with surface water bodies and enables the implementation of capillary rise. However, these models face multiple obstacles due to their coarse spatial resolution. The study concludes that a new understanding is required on how these models can be evaluated, and that merely increasing the spatial resolution is not an elixir to improving the simulation of the global freshwater system.
Internship work: The Importance of Cooperation Between Transboundary River Countries – 2019
This work was composed during an internship at the International Centre for Water Resources and Global Change (ICWRGC), during a span of 3 months, from May to August in 2019. Taking up the publication from Molnar, Kata, et al. (2017), this internship work focuses on cooperation between countries. It points out the importance of cooperation especially within transboundary river countries using the Nile and the Rhine River as examples where cooperation has developed over time.
Download (PDF, 2019, 14 S., 1MB)Veronika Zwirglmaier from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) stayed at the ICWRGC from May to November 2019 to write her master’s thesis on “Assessment of Future Impacts of Climate Change, Land Use Change and Water Demand on Freshwater Resources in the Mediterranean Region – A Meta-Analysis”. She successfully defended her thesis at TUM in December 2019.
Freshwater is a vital resource for all forms of life on earth. Thus, it is important to guarantee its sustainable management facing multiple pressures such as climate change, land use change and water demand as well as feedbacks between these drivers. The Mediterranean region is particularly vulnerable to alterations in climate and environment. The goal of this thesis was to assess the future development of the quantity of freshwater resources in the Mediterranean region. It was performed in the scope of the MedECC (Mediterranean Experts on Environmental and Climate Change) initiative.
The assessment is based on 99 recent, individually published simulation results found during a systematic literature review following pre-defined patterns. By performing qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods, a comprehensive statement on the future freshwater situation in the Mediterranean region was made at a basin, country and regional scale under various climate change, land use change and water demand projection scenarios.
Future climate scenarios predicted a general reduction of water quantity for the Mediterranean countries. However, the trend was less pronounced in some regions or even showing an increase. This was particularly noticeable in countries with complex topographies and small-scale climate patterns. In terms of land-use changes, urbanization showed the most dominating effect by revealing an increase in extreme discharges and a decrease in groundwater recharge. Future scenarios forecast an increasing water demand for all countries with available data. Yet, only few studies were available investigating how an adapted water management would impact on water demand and therefore on the overall water availability.
Expanding the performed meta-analysis by further data would increase the robustness of the statements and small-scale analyses would help to better represent the complex situation in topographically diverse countries to ensure a sustainable management of future water resources.
If you are interested in reading the entire pdf of the master thesis, you may contact .
Bruno Bezerra Bluhm from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) stayed at the ICWRGC from 13 May – 12 November 2019 to write his master’s thesis on the topic “Uncertainty Quantification Framework for Nutrient Load Estimation”. He successfully defended his thesis at TUM on 5 December 2019.
Nutrient loads, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, are a key indicator of water quality monitoring, management and assessment, particularly regarding eutrophication. Although flow data is commonly available in continuous forms, monitoring programs often sample concentration following low-frequency policies, which hinders flux calculations. This consequently limits purposes of load estimations, since, in order for the metric to be used in evaluations, its uncertainty must be within an expected threshold. This Master’s thesis conceives an uncertainty quantification framework to be used by an existing load estimation algorithm from GEMStat. The framework calculates expected errors by matching a target station, i.e. scarce data, and a reference station, i.e. continuous data. Brazil, a major GEMStat partner, has been selected as a case study to define the target station baseline. By performing Monte Carlo Simulations and credibility-based assessments, the framework evaluates which estimation algorithm is most suitable and what are the expected levels of uncertainty, given in three forms: credible interval, relative absolute error, and classification (under or overestimation). Expanding the current database to include a greater range of reference stations is the main challenge to improve the framework’s usability in the future.
If you are interested in reading the entire pdf of the master thesis, you may contact Mr. Bluhm at:
Mihir Rambhia from TUM stayed at the ICWRGC from 07.11.2018–06.05.2019 to write his master thesis dealing with the “Observed Impact on Water Resources in the Mediterranean Region: A Meta-Analysis”. He successfully completed this thesis in May 2019.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recognized the Mediterranean region as the major ’hot-spot of climate change’. This, along with other anthropogenic drivers such as land use change and the change in water demand, is expected to significantly alter the average availability of freshwater resources in the region. This study uses a meta-analysis approach to identify the impact of these drivers on the observed quantitative change and trends in the water resources of the 22 countries bordering on the Mediterranean. In total, 125 studies were included in the meta-analysis covering climatic parameters (temperature), hydrological parameters (precipitation, evapotranspiration, and streamflow), and event parameters (droughts). For all the parameters except temperature, a highly heterogeneous spatial and temporal pattern has been observed within the countries. A decreasing precipitation trend in the Mediterranean is also in contradiction with globally increasing wetter conditions. Overall, it has been observed that with an increase in mean temperature and evaporation, and a decrease in precipitation and runoff, the climate in the Mediterranean region has become drier and warmer over the study period. However, the attribution of the observed changes could not be entirely implemented based on the selected drivers, due to a lack of such reporting in the primary studies.
If you are interested in reading the entire pdf of the master thesis, you may contact Mihir at:
The Special Issue in the journal “Advances of Geosciences” has been produced as a follow-up to the 17th Biennial Conference ERB 2018. It contains contributions summarising conference presentations, edited by B. Schmalz (TU Darmstadt), S. Dietrich (ICWRGC), and J. L. M. P. de Lima (University of Coimbra).
The ERB 2018 international conference on “Innovative monitoring techniques and modelling approaches for analysing hydrological processes in small basins” was held in Darmstadt, Germany, 11–14 September 2018. It was attended by scientists from 19 different countries.
ERB is the Euromediterranean Network of Experimental and Representative Basins (https://erb-network.simdif.com/index.html).
MedECC booklet publishedA booklet by the MedECC initiative with information on climate change in the Mediterranean region and its impacts on water, food security, ecosystems, human security and health was published in December 2018 …
