Impact of land use change on future water quality
Urban encroachment and demand for increased yields from agricultural production are placing significant stress on rivers and lakes at an ecosystem functional level and on water resource management capabilities. Technical and policy interventions are required to meet future human water needs. The Centre of Excellence for Ecohydrology has initiated dialogue between a number of world class research institutions as part of an agreed collaborative approach to tackling the increasingly urgent issue of securing, protecting and managing water resources. This project consolidates recent developments with the key institutions in China, Australia and the UK; and will develop collaborative research proposals targeting land use change impacts on runoff yield and water quality under variable climatic regimes. The proposal will provide for the development and delivery of two key workshops.
This proposal will build on an existing relationship between the research partners and focus on the global challenge of maintaining and securing water resources for the future. As part of that challenge appropriate technologies and management techniques will be required to asses & monitor the impacts of agricultural and urban activities on water quality and runoff yield particularly in climatic regimes that are either areas of declining rainfall (South West WA) or increasing rainfall (SE China). The capacity to develop appropriate sensor technologies to improve environmental monitoring and evaluate anthropogenic activities is paramount in tackling this issue.
The research program to be discussed will bring together groups from multidisciplinary areas in computational mathematics, engineering, agriculture and hydrology to define the issues facing the global community in addressing nonpoint source pollutants arising from land use change- either for agriculture or urban/industrial use. Current technologies are expensive and often inadequate to cope with the range of environments and multiple scales of pollutants that impact water resources. This project will link sensor capabilities to scale, cost and pollutant (eg salinity, nutrient, chemical) and enable these sensors to operate as an integrated network for catchments.