Impact of climate change on hydrologic processes and water quality

Improved understanding of how weather and climate influence short- and long-term fate and behaviour of different substances in the soil may improve our ability to minimize risks and achieve environmental goals.

Climate change will directly affect diffuse nutrient and pesticide losses by altering key hydrologic processes and also critical turnover and transformation processes in soil, through altered soil moisture and temperature regimes. We use process-oriented mathematical models driven by time-series weather data (e.g. COUP, SOILN_DB, ICECREAM, MACRO) to predict nutrient and pesticide loadings to water systems in a changed climate.

A complementary approach is to evaluate the impact of historical climate on nutrient losses by statistical analysis of our long-term field experiments and data from environmental monitoring programs (arable fields and agricultural catchments)