She wants to be able to forecast which specific features in streams will encourage a particularly powerful process of exchange. Her three-year project entitled “Vorhersage von Transportprozessen in Bächen,” or “Predicting Transport Processes in Streams,” has just been launched and could help to gauge how this exchange is being altered by the effects of climate change on the water cycle.
Even if it sometimes appears to be the case, bodies of running water are not “pipes” in the landscape that are open at the top but otherwise sealed off from their surroundings—instead, they are engaged in a constant exchange. The water gets into the subsoil, spreads out on either side and can flow back into the watercourse that it came from further downstream, and these varied processes of exchange with the surrounding landscape are important for water quality.
Background to the project
As we have all noticed, climate change is getting worse—which is having a direct impact on the planet’s water cycle. Whether it is heavy rain sparking catastrophic flooding, as happened in the Ahrtal valley in 2021, or dry spells and droughts, the consequences of these extreme events for living beings and for the water quality in rivers and streams have been hard to estimate up until now.
“So that we can get better at predicting and thus managing them, and in order to preserve the ecosystem over the long term, we need a precise mathematical description of the transport and exchange processes at play in the stream system,” says Dr. Glaser, who is also a member of the Sustainable Futures Transdisciplinary Research Area at the University of Bonn. Working with mathematical models, she intends to define a set of parameters that will describe these transport and exchange processes in a stream, even during extreme events.
Aims of the research
A natural stream exhibits a vast amount of diversity from one end of its course to the other: rocks, stones, dead wood, islets, hollows, bends and flat sections, light and shade as well as all manner of different vegetation. All of this exerts an influence on the transport and exchange processes, i.e. the speed at which the water flows and how it gets into the stream sediment. This contains a range of micro-organisms, whose activity can bring about a lasting improvement in the quality of the water as it flows into the sediment, especially if the water then re-enters the stream further downstream. This can lead to a reduction in nitrate pollution in the watercourse, for instance.
Read more in the Klaus Tschira Stiftung’s press release: https://klaus-tschira-stiftung.de/meldungen/kleine-stroeme-grosse-wirkung/
