Urban land use disproportionately affects river water quality due to inputs from the catchment, but conversely urban catchments are relatively neglected as a research topic. Water quality in urban areas is often very poor and deteriorates during extreme events like floods and drought. Our research focuses on the effects of extreme events on water quality within…

Read more Urban hydrology & water quality

Floods and droughts severely impact societies and ecosystems around the world. We are working in different areas around the world to increase drought preparedness, for example by improving drought monitoring in Chile & Peru and by improving resilience to floods and droughts in southern Africa. Previous projects include CreativeDrought and Supporting Effective Drought Risk Management in…

Read more Resilience to hydrological extremes

In our human-modified era, the Anthropocene, hydrological drought is not only caused by natural processes (such as precipitation deficit), human influences should be included as additional driver. Our research focuses on the complex feedbacks between hydrological drought and human activities such as reservoir building, groundwater abstraction, and land use change. We are using data-based methods…

Read more Drought in the Anthropocene

Mangrove forests are valuable coastal ecosystems in tropical coastal regions around the world. Mangrove restoration projects, aimed at restoring important values of mangrove forests after degradation, often fail because hydrological conditions are disregarded. In a long-term research project, in collaboration with colleagues at Wageningen University (The Netherlands), we are investigating what the most important hydrological…

Read more Mangrove hydrology

Flooding is a significant natural hazard in many areas around the world, including the UK and the Netherlands. Flood risk is a combination of hazard with exposure and vulnerability to the flood, which depend on various socio-economic, cultural, historical and political factors. To reduce this flood risk there has been a global shift to Flood…

Read more Flood Risk Management

Groundwater drought (below normal groundwater levels) is a major and potentially increasing threat to water security globally, because society becomes more and more dependent on groundwater for various purposes. Our research focuses on the processes underlying the development of groundwater drought in different parts of the world taking into account meteorological drivers, hydrogeological and land surface…

Read more Groundwater drought

Hydrological drought (anomalies in streamflow and groundwater levels) in cold climates are caused by a combination of anomalies in precipitation and temperature, dependent on local climate. Winter low flows can be lower than normal, snow melt peaks can be delayed, glacier melt can be decreased. Our research tries to understand the interplay between the meteorological…

Read more Drought in cold climates

Drought develops from atmospheric drivers (anomalies in precipitation and temperature / potential evaporation) and their interaction with the land surface. Based on the characteristics of the land surface and antecedent conditions, these atmospheric drivers trigger certain soil moisture drought and/or hydrological drought conditions in different areas. In our research we investigate this drought propagation from…

Read more Drought propagation