Welcome to our blog!

Hi there and welcome to our new blog site for the Water Sciences Group at the University of Birmingham. We are a group of researchers who are interested in all things watery from ecology to water chemistry to hydrology and on! We hope that this page will be a place where we can discuss issues and advances in the science, provide some details of the research that we are doing and keep everyone informed of conferences, publications and such like that are coming up. Please feel free to post as much or as little as you want.

Wednesday 6 October 2010

4th Developments in Water Treatment and Supply Conference

The UK Network on Potable Water Treatment and Supply encourages multidisciplinary research, education and development in the field of potable water treatment. Following the success of the previous three conferences, the purpose of this two day meeting is to promote the exchange of the latest information and developments in water resources,treatment and supply. Attended by over 100 delegates, the conference will provide an excellent opportunity for scientists,engineers, regulators and researchers working in all aspects of potable water provision to debate key issues.

The theme of the conference is applied research and development in all aspects of water treatment and supply. Abstracts are welcomed in any of the following areas:
○ Novel treatment processes
○ Distribution systems
○ Energy
○ Monitoring
○ Emerging contaminants
○ Sludge treatment
○ Treatment process optimisation
○ Asset management
○ Catchment management
○ Modelling and simulation

The price for the 2011 conference will be £350, which includes refreshments during both days and the conference dinner.

For further information, including conference themes and paper submission dates, please go to http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/sas/aboutus/events/page49003.html, or contact waterdevelopments2011@contacts.bham.ac.uk

Tuesday 5 October 2010

new journal article

Global threats to human water security and river biodiversity
C. J. Vorosmarty1, P. B. McIntyre, M. O. Gessner, D. Dudgeon, A. Prusevich, P. Green, S. Glidden, S. E. Bunn,C. A. Sullivan, C. Reidy Liermann & P. M. Davies
Nature 467, 555-561 (2010)
Protecting the world’s freshwater resources requires diagnosing threats over a broad range of scales, fromglobal to local.Here we present the first worldwide synthesis to jointly consider human and biodiversity perspectives on water securityusing a spatial framework that quantifies multiple stressors and accounts for downstream impacts. We find that nearly 80% of the world’s population is exposed to high levels of threat to water security. Massive investment in water technology enables rich nations to offset high stressor levels without remedying their underlying causes, whereas less wealthy nations remain vulnerable. A similar lack of precautionary investment jeopardizes biodiversity, with habitats associated with 65% of continental discharge classified as moderately to highly threatened. The cumulative threat framework offers a tool for prioritizing policy and management responses to this crisis, and underscores the necessity of limiting threats at their source instead of through costly remediation of symptoms in order to assure global water security for both humans and freshwater biodiversity