TY - JOUR
A1 - Weng, Wei
A1 - Lüdeke, Matthias K. B.
A1 - Zemp, Delphine Clara
A1 - Lakes, Tobia
A1 - Kropp, Jürgen
T1 - Aerial and surface rivers
BT - downwind impacts on water availability from land use changes in Amazonia
JF - Hydrology and earth system sciences : HESS
N2 - The abundant evapotranspiration provided by the Amazon forests is an important component of the hydrological cycle, both regionally and globally. Since the last century, deforestation and expanding agricultural activities have been changing the ecosystem and its provision of moisture to the atmosphere. However, it remains uncertain how the ongoing land use change will influence rainfall, runoff, and water availability as findings from previous studies differ. Using moisture tracking experiments based on observational data, we provide a spatially detailed analysis recognizing potential teleconnection between source and sink regions of atmospheric moisture. We apply land use scenarios in upwind moisture sources and quantify the corresponding rainfall and runoff changes in downwind moisture sinks. We find spatially varying responses of water regimes to land use changes, which may explain the diverse results from previous studies. Parts of the Peruvian Amazon and western Bolivia are identified as the sink areas most sensitive to land use change in the Amazon and we highlight the current water stress by Amazonian land use change on these areas in terms of the water availability. Furthermore, we also identify the influential source areas where land use change may considerably reduce a given target sink's water reception (from our example of the Ucayali River basin outlet, rainfall by 5–12 % and runoff by 19–50 % according to scenarios). Sensitive sinks and influential sources are therefore suggested as hotspots for achieving sustainable land–water management.
Y1 - 2018
U6 - https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-911-2018
SN - 1027-5606
SN - 1607-7938
VL - 22
IS - 1
SP - 911
EP - 927
PB - Copernicus
CY - Göttingen
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Pradhan, Prajal
A1 - Kropp, Jürgen
T1 - Interplay between diets, health, and climate change
JF - Sustainability
N2 - The world is facing a triple burden of undernourishment, obesity, and environmental impacts from agriculture while nourishing its population. This burden makes sustainable nourishment of the growing population a global challenge. Addressing this challenge requires an understanding of the interplay between diets, health, and associated environmental impacts (e.g., climate change). For this, we identify 11 typical diets that represent dietary habits worldwide for the last five decades. Plant-source foods provide most of all three macronutrients (carbohydrates, protein, and fat) in developing countries. In contrast, animal-source foods provide a majority of protein and fat in developed ones. The identified diets deviate from the recommended healthy diet with either too much (e.g., red meat) or too little (e.g., fruits and vegetables) food and nutrition supply. The total calorie supplies are lower than required for two diets. Sugar consumption is higher than recommended for five diets. Three and five diets consist of larger-than-recommended carbohydrate and fat shares, respectively. Four diets with a large share of animal-source foods exceed the recommended value of red meat. Only two diets consist of at least 400 gm/cap/day of fruits and vegetables while accounting for food waste. Prevalence of undernourishment and underweight dominates in the diets with lower calories. In comparison, a higher prevalence of obesity is observed for diets with higher calories with high shares of sugar, fat, and animal-source foods. However, embodied emissions in the diets do not show a clear relation with calorie supplies and compositions. Two high-calorie diets embody more than 1.5 t CO2eq/cap/yr, and two low-calorie diets embody around 1 t CO2eq/cap/yr. Our analysis highlights that sustainable and healthy diets can serve the purposes of both nourishing the population and, at the same time, reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture.
KW - dietary patterns
KW - healthy diets
KW - embodied emissions
KW - diet shifts
KW - sustainable diets
KW - emission intensity
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093878
SN - 2071-1050
VL - 12
IS - 9
PB - MDPI
CY - Basel
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Krummenauer, Linda
A1 - Costa, Luís Fílípe Carvalho da
A1 - Prahl, Boris F.
A1 - Kropp, Jürgen
T1 - Future heat adaptation and exposure among urban populations and why a prospering economy alone won’t save us
JF - Scientific reports
N2 - When inferring on the magnitude of future heat-related mortality due to climate change, human adaptation to heat should be accounted for. We model long-term changes in minimum mortality temperatures (MMT), a well-established metric denoting the lowest risk of heat-related mortality, as a function of climate change and socio-economic progress across 3820 cities. Depending on the combination of climate trajectories and socio-economic pathways evaluated, by 2100 the risk to human health is expected to decline in 60% to 80% of the cities against contemporary conditions. This is caused by an average global increase in MMTs driven by long-term human acclimatisation to future climatic conditions and economic development of countries. While our adaptation model suggests that negative effects on health from global warming can broadly be kept in check, the trade-offs are highly contingent to the scenario path and location-specific. For high-forcing climate scenarios (e.g. RCP8.5) the maintenance of uninterrupted high economic growth by 2100 is a hard requirement to increase MMTs and level-off the negative health effects from additional scenario-driven heat exposure. Choosing a 2 degrees C-compatible climate trajectory alleviates the dependence on fast growth, leaving room for a sustainable economy, and leads to higher reductions of mortality risk.
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-99757-0
SN - 2045-2322
VL - 11
IS - 1
PB - Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature
CY - Berlin
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Athare, Tushar Ramchandra
A1 - Pradhan, Prajal
A1 - Singh, S. R. K.
A1 - Kropp, Jürgen
T1 - India consists of multiple food systems with scoioeconomic and environmental variations
JF - PLOS ONE / Public Library of Science
N2 - Agriculture in India accounts for 18% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and uses significant land and water. Various socioeconomic factors and food subsidies influence diets in India. Indian food systems face the challenge of sustainably nourishing the 1.3 billion population. However, existing studies focus on a few food system components, and holistic analysis is still missing. We identify Indian food systems covering six food system components: food consumption, production, processing, policy, environmental footprints, and socioeconomic factors from the latest Indian household consumer expenditure survey. We identify 10 Indian food systems using k-means cluster analysis on 15 food system indicators belonging to the six components. Based on the major source of calorie intake, we classify the ten food systems into production-based (3), subsidy-based (3), and market-based (4) food systems. Home-produced and subsidized food contribute up to 2000 kcal/consumer unit (CU)/day and 1651 kcal/CU/day, respectively, in these food systems. The calorie intake of 2158 to 3530 kcal/CU/day in the food systems reveals issues of malnutrition in India. Environmental footprints are commensurate with calorie intake in the food systems. Embodied GHG, land footprint, and water footprint estimates range from 1.30 to 2.19 kg CO(2)eq/CU/day, 3.89 to 6.04 m(2)/CU/day, and 2.02 to 3.16 m(3)/CU/day, respectively. Our study provides a holistic understanding of Indian food systems for targeted nutritional interventions on household malnutrition in India while also protecting planetary health.
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270342
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 17
IS - 8
PB - PLoS
CY - San Fransisco
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Khurana, Swamini
A1 - Hesse, Falk
A1 - Kleidon-Hildebrandt, Anke
A1 - Thullner, Martin
T1 - Should we worry about surficial dynamics when assessing nutrient cycling in the groundwater?
JF - Frontiers in water
N2 - The fluxes of water and solutes in the subsurface compartment of the Critical Zone are temporally dynamic and it is unclear how this impacts microbial mediated nutrient cycling in the spatially heterogeneous subsurface. To investigate this, we undertook numerical modeling, simulating the transport in a wide range of spatially heterogeneous domains, and the biogeochemical transformation of organic carbon and nitrogen compounds using a complex microbial community with four (4) distinct functional groups, in water saturated subsurface compartments. We performed a comprehensive uncertainty analysis accounting for varying residence times and spatial heterogeneity. While the aggregated removal of chemical species in the domains over the entire simulation period was approximately the same as that in steady state conditions, the sub-scale temporal variation of microbial biomass and chemical discharge from a domain depended strongly on the interplay of spatial heterogeneity and temporal dynamics of the forcing. We showed that the travel time and the Damkohler number (Da) can be used to predict the temporally varying chemical discharge from a spatially heterogeneous domain. In homogeneous domains, chemical discharge in temporally dynamic conditions could be double of that in the steady state conditions while microbial biomass varied up to 75% of that in steady state conditions. In heterogeneous domains, the interquartile range of uncertainty in chemical discharge in reaction dominated systems (log(10)Da > 0) was double of that in steady state conditions. However, high heterogeneous domains resulted in outliers where chemical discharge could be as high as 10-20 times of that in steady state conditions in high flow periods. And in transport dominated systems (log(10)Da < 0), the chemical discharge could be half of that in steady state conditions in unusually low flow conditions. In conclusion, ignoring spatio-temporal heterogeneities in a numerical modeling approach may exacerbate inaccurate estimation of nutrient export and microbial biomass. The results are relevant to long-term field monitoring studies, and for homogeneous soil column-scale experiments investigating the role of temporal dynamics on microbial redox dynamics.
KW - reactive transport modeling
KW - spatio-temporal heterogeneity
KW - uncertainty
KW - geomicrobial activity
KW - nutrient export
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/frwa.2022.780297
SN - 2624-9375
VL - 4
PB - Frontiers Media
CY - Lausanne
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Schneidemesser, Erika von
A1 - Sibiya, Bheki
A1 - Caseiro, Alexandre
A1 - Butler, Tim
A1 - Lawrence, Mark
A1 - Leitao, Joana
A1 - Lupaşcu, Aura
A1 - Salvador, Pedro
T1 - Learning from the COVID-19 lockdown in Berlin
BT - Observations and modelling to support understanding policies to reduce NO2
JF - Atmospheric environment: X
N2 - Urban air pollution is a substantial threat to human health. Traffic emissions remain a large contributor to air pollution in urban areas. The mobility restrictions put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic provided a large-scale real-world experiment that allows for the evaluation of changes in traffic emissions and the corresponding changes in air quality. Here we use observational data, as well as modelling, to analyse changes in nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and particulate matter resulting from the COVID-19 restrictions at the height of the lockdown period in Spring of 2020. Accounting for the influence of meteorology on air quality, we found that reduction of ca. 30-50 % in traffic counts, dominated by changes in passenger cars, corresponded to reductions in median observed nitrogen dioxide concentrations of ca. 40 % (traffic and urban background locations) and a ca. 22 % increase in ozone (urban background locations) during weekdays. Lesser reductions in nitrogen dioxide concentrations were observed at urban background stations at weekends, and no change in ozone was observed. The modelled reductions in median nitrogen dioxide at urban background locations were smaller than the observed reductions and the change was not significant. The model results showed no significant change in ozone on weekdays or weekends. The lack of a simulated weekday/weekend effect is consistent with previous work suggesting that NOx emissions from traffic could be significantly underestimated in European cities by models. These results indicate the potential for improvements in air quality due to policies for reducing traffic, along with the scale of reductions that would be needed to result in meaningful changes in air quality if a transition to sustainable mobility is to be seriously considered. They also confirm once more the highly relevant role of traffic for air quality in urban areas.
KW - Urban areas
KW - Air pollution
KW - Emissions
KW - COVID-19
KW - Nitrogen dioxide
KW - Ozone
KW - Europe
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aeaoa.2021.100122
SN - 2590-1621
VL - 12
PB - Elsevier
CY - Amsterdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Freymark, Jessica
A1 - Bott, Judith
A1 - Cacace, Mauro
A1 - Ziegler, Moritz 0.
A1 - Scheck-Wenderoth, Magdalena
T1 - Influence of the Main Border Faults on the 3D Hydraulic Field of the Central Upper Rhine Graben
JF - Geofluids
N2 - The Upper Rhine Graben (URG) is an active rift with a high geothermal potential. Despite being a well-studied area, the three-dimensional interaction of the main controlling factors of the thermal and hydraulic regime is still not fully understood. Therefore, we have used a data-based 3D structural model of the lithological configuration of the central URG for some conceptual numerical experiments of 3D coupled simulations of fluid and heat transport. To assess the influence of the main faults bordering the graben on the hydraulic and the deep thermal field, we carried out a sensitivity analysis on fault width and permeability. Depending on the assigned width and permeability of the main border faults, fluid velocity and temperatures are affected only in the direct proximity of the respective border faults. Hence, the hydraulic characteristics of these major faults do not significantly influence the graben-wide groundwater flow patterns. Instead, the different scenarios tested provide a consistent image of the main characteristics of fluid and heat transport as they have in common: (1) a topography-driven basin-wide fluid flow perpendicular to the rift axis from the graben shoulders to the rift center, (2) a N/NE-directed flow parallel to the rift axis in the center of the rift and, (3) a pronounced upflow of hot fluids along the rift central axis, where the streams from both sides of the rift merge. This upflow axis is predicted to occur predominantly in the center of the URG (northern and southern model area) and shifted towards the eastern boundary fault (central model area).
Y1 - 2019
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/7520714
SN - 1468-8115
SN - 1468-8123
PB - Wiley-Hindawi
CY - London
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Vyse, Stuart Andrew
A1 - Semiromi, Majid Taie
A1 - Lischeid, Gunnar
A1 - Merz, Christoph
T1 - Characterizing hydrological processes within kettle holes using stable water isotopes in the Uckermark of northern Brandenburg, Germany
JF - Hydrological Processes
N2 - Understanding the hydrologic connectivity between kettle holes and shallow groundwater, particularly in reaction to the highly variable local meteorological conditions, is of paramount importance for tracing water in a hydro(geo)logically complex landscape and thus for integrated water resource management. This article is aimed at identifying the dominant hydrological processes affecting the kettle holes' water balance and their interactions with the shallow groundwater domain in the Uckermark region, located in the north-east of Germany. For this reason, based on the stable isotopes of oxygen (delta O-18) and hydrogen (delta H-2), an isotopic mass balance model was employed to compute the evaporative loss of water from the kettle holes from February to August 2017. Results demonstrated that shallow groundwater inflow may play the pivotal role in the processes taking part in the hydrology of the kettle holes in the Uckermark region. Based on the calculated evaporation/inflow (E/I) ratios, most of the kettle holes (86.7%) were ascertained to have a partially open, flow-through-dominated system. Moreover, we identified an inverse correlation between E/I ratios and the altitudes of the kettle holes. The same holds for electrical conductivity (EC) and the altitudes of the kettle holes. In accordance with the findings obtained from this study, a conceptual model explaining the interaction between the shallow groundwater and the kettle holes of Uckermark was developed. The model exhibited that across the highest altitudes, the recharge kettle holes are dominant, where a lower ratio of E/I and a lower EC was detected. By contrast, the lowest topographical depressions represent the discharge kettle holes, where a higher ratio of E/I and EC could be identified. The kettle holes existing in between were categorized as flow-through kettle holes through which the recharge takes place from one side and discharge from the other side.
KW - evaporation
KW - groundwater inflow
KW - kettle hole
KW - stable water isotope
KW - surface–groundwater interactions
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.13699
SN - 0885-6087
SN - 1099-1085
VL - 34
IS - 8
SP - 1868
EP - 1887
PB - Wiley
CY - New York
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Smetanová, Anna
A1 - Müller, Anne
A1 - Zargar, Morteza
A1 - Suleiman, Mohamed A.
A1 - Gholami, Faraz Rabei
A1 - Mousavi, Maryam
T1 - Mesoscale mapping of sediment source hotspots for dam sediment management in data-sparse semi-arid catchments
JF - Water
N2 - Land degradation and water availability in semi-arid regions are interdependent challenges for management that are influenced by climatic and anthropogenic changes. Erosion and high sediment loads in rivers cause reservoir siltation and decrease storage capacity, which pose risk on water security for citizens, agriculture, and industry. In regions where resources for management are limited, identifying spatial-temporal variability of sediment sources is crucial to decrease siltation. Despite widespread availability of rigorous methods, approaches simplifying spatial and temporal variability of erosion are often inappropriately applied to very data sparse semi-arid regions. In this work, we review existing approaches for mapping erosional hotspots, and provide an example of spatial-temporal mapping approach in two case study regions. The barriers limiting data availability and their effects on erosion mapping methods, their validation, and resulting prioritization of leverage management areas are discussed.
KW - reservoir siltation
KW - water security
KW - water management
KW - data sharing
KW - spatial-temporal
KW - erosion hotspots
KW - mapping
KW - global datasets
KW - mesoscale
KW - leverage areas
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/w12020396
SN - 2073-4441
VL - 12
IS - 2
SP - 1
EP - 24
PB - MDPI
CY - Basel
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Siegmund, Nicole
A1 - Panebianco, Juan E.
A1 - Avecilla, Fernando
A1 - Iturri, Laura Antonela
A1 - Sommer, Michael
A1 - Buschiazzo, Daniel
A1 - Funk, Roger
T1 - From gustiness to dustiness
BT - the impact of wind gusts on particulate matter emissions in field experiments in La Pampa, Argentina
JF - Atmosphere
N2 - This study delivers the first empirical data-driven analysis of the impact of turbulence induced gustiness on the fine dust emissions from a measuring field. For quantification of the gust impact, a new measure, the Gust uptake Efficiency (GuE) is introduced. GuE provides a percentage of over- or under-proportional dust uptake due to gust activity during a wind event. For the three analyzed wind events, GuE values of up to 150% could be found, yet they significantly differed per particle size class with a tendency for lower values for smaller particles. In addition, a high-resolution correlation analysis among 31 particle size classes and wind speed was conducted; it revealed strong negative correlation coefficients for very small particles and positive correlations for bigger particles, where 5 mu m appears to be an empirical threshold dividing both directions. We conclude with a number of suggestions for further investigations: an optimized field experiment setup, a new particle size ratio (PM1/PM0.5 in addition to PM10/PM2.5), as well as a comprehensive data-driven search for an optimal wind gust definition in terms of soil erosivity.
KW - wind gusts
KW - wind erosion
KW - particle uptake
KW - dust plumes
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13081173
SN - 2073-4433
VL - 13
IS - 8
PB - MDPI
CY - Basel
ER -