Call for Abstracts! - EGU26 Session HS8.2.14 : What have we learned about the role of groundwater in critical zone dynamics in a changing environment?
Agnès Rivière
“What have we learned about the role of groundwater in critical zone dynamics in a changing environment?”
We are also delighted to announce that Landon Halloran, Senior Lecturer at the University of Neuchâtel, will join us as our invited speaker.
Agnès Rivière, Anne Jost, Ronan Abhervé & Konstantina Katsanou
Mines Paris - PSL
35, rue Saint Honoré, 77300 Fontainebleau
https://www.minesparis.psl.eu
Groundwater's strategic importance for
ecosystems (biodiversity, and societies) is gaining prominence.
Groundwaters play a critical role in natural cycles, redistributing
water, energy and matters in the subsurface and sustaining surface water
bodies and ensuring related biodiversity. Overall groundwater is key
for continental areas, by providing essential ecosystem services hence
ensuring water, energy, and food security.
Groundwater dynamics significantly impact ecosystems. Non stationarity
of groundwater systems dynamics under global changes put these
ecosystems at threat. Therefore, it is key to characterize these
ecosystem-groundwater interrelationships by studying the quantitative
and qualitative impacts of ecosystems on groundwater resources through a
wide range of tools such as characterizing the transit and residence
time of water and elements in groundwater systems, the
vegetation-atmosphere-unsaturated zone interactions with the aquifers
enabling to quantify in aquifer recharge and stream-aquifer exchanges.
To do that hydrogeological models are pivotal tools to characterise and
anticipate potential change of these relationships between ecosystems
and groundwater. However, due to the extreme heterogeneity of
environmental processes and parameters, and our inability to fully
characterise that heterogeneity, all hydrogeological models need to be
calibrated against relevant geological, geophysical, hydrogeochemical
and hydrological data to improve the robustness of predictions and
reduce model uncertainty. Observatories provide long-term, spatially
detailed information on groundwater resources, enabling in-depth
studies, that consider the interplay of territorial changes together
with climate change. These observatories therefore provide the
opportunity to identify key processes driving these changes, occurring
at the local or regional scales. Installed in heterogeneous
environments, observatories consider different aquifer types at
different geographical areas and reflect the interplay between land
uses, climate zones, and human pressures on the dynamics of groundwater
resources in ecosystems changing.
This session seeks to highlight innovative approaches that integrate
field data with advanced modelling techniques to deepen the
understanding of complex hydrological, hydrogeological, and
ecohydrological systems under the impact of global change.
Landon Halloran