1. Water and the Environment 1.1. The Hydrological Cycle 1.2. Surface Water and Groundwater 1.3. Aquatic Ecosystems 1.4. Water Quality and Health 1.5. Climate Variability and Water Resources 1.6. Climate Change and Water Resources 1.7. Other Threats Linked to Water Resources 2. Water and Food: Agriculture 2.1. Water Requirements 2.2. Farming with Agrochemicals 2.3. Water and Animal Production S...

The transfer of hillslope water to and through the riparian zone forms a research area of importance in hydrological investigations. Numerical modelling schemes offer a way to visualise and quantify first-order controls on catchment runoff response and mixing. We use a two-dimensional Finite Element model to assess the link between model setup decisions (e.g. zero-flux boundary definitions, soi...

Variations of water stocks in the upper Zambezi river basin have been determined by 2 different hydrological modelling approaches. The purpose was to provide preliminary terrestrial storage estimates in the upper Zambezi, which will be compared with estimates derived from the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) in a future study. The first modelling approach is GIS-based, distribute...

Chemical fate assessment in a river basin requires flow and sediment characterization that can be performed by continuous field measurements or modelling. Once this step is completed, the environmental modelling can be started. In current assessments done in Ecuador, field data are not easily available and are also scarce. Therefore, the use of models is a challenge. Two models, AGNPS and SWAT,...

The conversion of wetlands to alternative uses, or land uses that affect either water levels or water quality, have profound implications for the ecological and hydrological services wetlands provide. This study considers the hydrological externalities of agricultural production in one freshwater wetland: the Esteros del Iberà in north-eastern Argentina. Two externalities are considered. First,...

Protecting water quality in forested regions is increasingly important as pressures from land-use, long-range transport of air pollutants, and climate change intensify. Maintaining forest industry without jeopardizing sustainability of surface water quality therefore requires new tools and approaches. Here, we show how forest management can be optimized by incorporating landscape sensitivity an...

A large number of data mining techniques and tools are available for extracting trends, characteristics or rules from data. A selection of those relevant to hydrology are covered in this paper. Clustering, classification, association rule extraction and dominant mode analysis and the ways in which each family of techniques could be used in a hydrological modelling context are considered. In add...

Deterioration of archaeological material often occurs as a consequence of change in the water balance. To better understand the preservation conditions and to protect archaeological deposits, it is necessary for any archaeological site to be placed within its wider natural environment, to understand the natural hydrological balance and possible changes that are being forced upon it by nature or...

Landscape-scale hydrological processes can greatly alter the local-scale water balance and many ecological processes linked to it. We hypothesized that in humid forest ecosystems, topographically driven lateral subsurface flow (SSF) has significant influence on ecophysiological processes such as gross primary productivity (GPP) and evapotranspiration (ET). To investigate how simplified hydrolog...