today, shortage of fresh water especially in arid and semi-arid regions has caused several difficulties.  whatever more than 70 percent of the earth is water, but also high salinity of water resources, caused serious restrictions for human to use these resources. therefore, desalination has attracted all attentions more than any time. between different water consumers in the country, agricultur...

The world’s fresh water resources are unequally distributed both in time and in space. Until recently water resource management focused on reallocating water to when and where it was required, a supply-side or fragmented approach. Nowadays there are signs that water resource availability is dwindling – due to both population growth and increased per capita water use – and ecosystems are being d...

The use of desalination technologies which produce concentrated brines is acutely limited by inadequate waste brine disposal mechanisms such that the brine does not contaminate fresh water resources. The treatment of highly saline brine using freeze desalination technique trade marked as HybridICE technology was investigated at pilot scale. The capacity of the HybridICE process to generate fres...

The small size of Na(+) and Cl(-) ions provides a bottleneck in desalination and is a challenge in providing alternatives for continuously depleting fresh water resources. Graphene by virtue of its structural properties has the potential to address this issue. Studies have indicated that use of monolayer graphene can be used to filter micro volumes of saline solution. Unfortunately it is extrem...

In coastal regions, the study of karst aquifers and the ground water resource exploitation require a specific methodology and exploration and monitoring techniques. Two directions are investigated, leading to new technological and methodological developments. The first investigation axis deals with the exploration of fresh water plumes from submarine karst springs. An Autonomous Underwater Vehi...

The uncertainty associated with predicting extreme weather events has serious implications for the developing world, owing to the greater societal vulnerability to such events. Continual exposure to unanticipated extreme events is a contributing factor for the descent into perpetual and structural rural poverty. We provide two examples of how probabilistic environmental prediction of extreme we...

Shrinking arable land due to soil salinization and, depleting fresh water resources pose serious worldwide constraints to crop productivity. A vision of using plant feedstock for biofuel production can only be realized if we can identify alternate species that can be grown on saline soils and therefore, would not compete for the resources required for conventional agriculture. Halophytes have r...

Increasing human appropriation of freshwater resources presents a tangible limit to the sustainability of cities, agriculture, and ecosystems in the western United States. Marc Reisner tackles this theme in his 1986 classic Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. Reisner's analysis paints a portrait of region-wide hydrologic dysfunction in the western United States, sugge...

Biological invasions have increased significantly in response to global change and constitute one of the major causes of biodiversity loss. Insects make up a large fraction of invasive species, in general, and freshwaters are among the most invaded ecosystems on our planet. However, even though aquatic insects dominate most inland waters, have unparalleled taxonomic diversity and occupy nearly ...