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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.

Thursday 24 May 2012

Recent paper in Journal of Environmental Quality


Recent paper in the Journal of Environmental Quality (co-published by the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and the Soil Science Society of America) co-authored by Cedric Laize (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology/University of Birmingham).

http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/17394/


Piniewski, Mikolaj; Laize, Cedric L.R.; Acreman, Michael C.; Okruszko, Tomasz; Schneider, Christof. 2012 Effect of climate change on environmental flow indicators in the Narew Basin, Poland. Journal of Environmental Quality. 10.2134/jeq2011.0386

Environmental flows, the quantity of water required to maintain a river ecosystem in its desired state, are of particular importance in areas of high natural value. Water-dependent ecosystems are exposed to the risk of climate change through altered precipitation and evaporation. Rivers in the Narew basin in northeastern Poland are known for their valuable river and wetland ecosystems, many of them in pristine or near-pristine condition. The objective of this study was to assess changes in the environmental flow regime of the Narew river system, caused by climate change, as simulated by hydrological models with different degrees of physical characterization and spatial aggregation. Two models were assessed: the river basin scale model Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and the continental model of water availability and use WaterGAP. Future climate change scenarios were provided by two general circulation models coupled with the A2 emission scenario: IPSL-CM4 and MIROC3.2. To assess the impact of climate change on environmental flows, a method based conceptually on the “range of variability” approach was used. The results indicate that the environmental flow regime in the Narew basin is subject to climate change risk, whose magnitude and spatial variability varies with climate model and hydrological modeling scale. Most of the analyzed sites experienced moderate impacts for the Generic Environmental Flow Indicator (GEFI), the Floodplain Inundation Indicator, and the River Habitat Availability Indicator. The consistency between SWAT and WaterGAP for GEFI was medium: in 55 to 66% of analyzed sites, the models suggested the same level of impact. Hence, we suggest that state-of-the- art, high-resolution, global- or continental-scale models, such as WaterGAP, could be useful tools for water management decisionmakers and wetland conservation practitioners, whereas models such as SWAT should serve as a complementary tool for more specific, smaller-scale, local assessments.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for knowledge share, I will be waiting for more in future

    Regards
    Marcus White Lisdoonvarna

    ReplyDelete