Twenty-three unsolved problems in hydrology (UPH)–a community perspective

This paper is the outcome of a community initiative to identify major unsolved scientific problems in hydrology motivated by a need for stronger harmonisation of research efforts. The procedure involved a public consultation through online media, followed by two workshops through which a large number of potential science questions were collated,...

Global phosphorus recovery from wastewater for agricultural reuse

Phosphorus is a nutrient necessary for the development of crops and is thus commonly applied as fertilizer to sustain agricultural production. It occurs naturally, in indefinite quantities of uncertain quality in phosphate rock formations, but also accumulates in urban and livestock wastewater wherefrom it is often lost as a pollutant....

Socio-Hydrological Approach to the Evaluation of Global Fertilizer Substitution by Sustainable Struvite Precipitants from Wastewater

Despite Africa controlling the vast majority of the global phosphate it also faces the greatest food shortages - partially due to a lack of access to the fertilizer market. A more accessible source of phosphorus comes from wastewater flows, which is currently lost through the discharge to open surface waters. Analysing the potential...

A socio-hydrological comparative assessment explaining regional variances in suicide rate amongst farmers in maharashtra, India

Maharashtra is one of the States in India that has witnessed one of the highest rates of farmer suicides as proportion of total number of suicides. Most of the farmer suicides in Maharashtra are from semi-arid divisions such as Marathwada where cotton has been historically grown. Other dominant crops produced include cereals, pulses, oilseeds...

Decent wage is more important than absolution of debts: A smallholder socio-hydrological modelling framework

Hydrological model parameter dimensionality is a weak measure of prediction uncertainty (discussion paper)

This paper shows that instability of hydrological system representation in response to different pieces of information and associated prediction uncertainty is a function of model complexity. After demonstrating the connection between unstable model representation and model complexity, complexity is analyzed in a step by step manner. This is...

Socio-hydrologic modeling to understand and mediate the competition for water between agriculture development and environmental health: Murrumbidgee River Basin, Australia

Competition for water between humans and ecosystems is set to become a flash point in the coming decades in many parts of the world. An entirely new and comprehensive quantitative framework is needed to establish a holistic understanding of that competition, thereby enabling the development of effective mediation strategies. This paper presents...

Socio-hydrologic modeling to understand and mediate the competition for water between agriculture development and environmental health: Murrumbidgee River Basin, Australia (discussion paper)

Competition for water between humans and ecosystems is set to become a flash point in the coming decades in many parts of the world. An entirely new and comprehensive quantitative framework is needed to establish a holistic understanding of that competition, thereby enabling the development of effective mediation strategies. This paper presents...

Hydrological model parameter dimensionality is a weak measure of prediction uncertainty (discussion paper)

This paper presents evidence that model prediction uncertainty does not necessarily rise with parameter dimensionality (the number of parameters). Here by prediction we mean future simulation of a variable of interest conditioned on certain future values of input variables. We utilize a relationship between prediction uncertainty, sample size...

A parsimonious hydrological model for a data scarce dryland region

Inapplicability of state of the art hydrological models due to scarce data motivates the need for a modeling approach that can be well constrained to available data and still model the dominant processes. Such an approach requires embedded model relationships to be simple and parsimonious in parameters for robust model selection. Simplicity in...