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Biomimicry is the art of mimicking nature to overcome a particular technical or scientific challenge. The approach studies how evolution has found solutions to the most complex problems in nature. This makes it a powerful method for science. In combination with the rapid development of manufacturing and information technologies into the digital age, structures and material that were before thought to be unrealizable can now be created with simple sketch and the touch of a button. This doctoral thesis had as its primary goal to investigate how digital tools, such as programming, modelling, 3D-Design tools and 3D-Printing, with the help from biomimicry, could lead to new analysis methods in science and new medical devices in medicine.
The Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) process is applied commonly to deform or mold hard metals that are difficult to work using normal machinery. A workpiece submerged in an electrolyte is deformed while being in close vicinity to an electrode. When high voltage is put between the workpiece and the electrode it will cause sparks that create cavitations on the substrate which in turn removes material and is flushed away by the electrolyte. Usually, such surfaces are analysed based on roughness, in this work another method using a novel curvature analysis method is presented as an alternative. In addition, to better understand how the surface changes during process time of the EDM process, a digital impact model was created which created craters on ridges on an originally flat substrate. These substrates were then analysed using the curvature analysis method at different processing times of the modelling. It was found that a substrate reaches an equilibrium at around 10000 impacts. The proposed curvature analysis method has potential to be used in the design of new cell culture substrates for stem cell.
The Venus flytrap can shut its jaws at an amazing speed. The shutting mechanism may be interesting to use in science and is an example of a so-called mechanical bi-stable system – there are two stable states. In this work two truncated pyramid structures were modelled using a non-linear mechanical model called the Chained Beam Constraint Model (CBCM). The structure with a slope angle of 30 degrees is not bi-stable and the structure with a slope angle of 45 degrees is bi-stable. Developing this idea further by using PEVA, which has a shape-memory effect, the structure which is not bi-stable could be programmed to be bi-stable and then turned off again. This could be used as an energy storage system. Another species which has interesting mechanism is the tapeworm. Some species of this animal has a crown of hooks and suckers located on its side. The parasite commonly is found in mammals in the lower intestine and attaches to the walls by using its suckers. When the tapeworm has found a suitable spot, it ejects its hooks and permanently attaches to the wall. This function could be used in minimally invasive medicine to have better control of implants during the implantation process. By using the CBCM model and a 3D-printer capable of tuning how hard or soft a printed part is, a design strategy was developed to investigate how one could create a device that mimics the tapeworm. In the end a prototype was created which was able attach to a pork loin at an under pressure of 20 kPa and to ejects its hooks at an under pressure of 50 kPa or above.
These three projects is an exhibit of how digital tools and biomimicry can be used together to come up with applicable solutions in science and in medicine.
Functional traits determine biomass dynamics, coexistence and energetics in plankton food webs
(2022)
Plankton food webs are the basis of marine and limnetic ecosystems. Especially aquatic ecosystems of high biodiversity provide important ecosystem services for humankind as providers of food, coastal protection, climate regulation, and tourism. Understanding the dynamics of biomass and coexistence in these food webs is a first step to understanding the ecosystems. It also lays the foundation for the development of management strategies for the maintenance of the marine and freshwater biodiversity despite anthropogenic influences.
Natural food webs are highly complex, and thus often equally complex methods are needed to analyse and understand them well. Models can help to do so as they depict simplified parts of reality. In the attempt to get a broader understanding of the complex food webs, diverse methods are used to investigate different questions.
In my first project, we compared the energetics of a food chain in two versions of an allometric trophic network model. In particular, we solved the problem of unrealistically high trophic transfer efficiencies (up to 70%) by accounting for both basal respiration and activity respiration, which decreased the trophic transfer efficiency to realistic values of ≤30%. Next in my second project I turned to plankton food webs and especially phytoplankton traits. Investigating a long-term data set from Lake Constance we found evidence for a trade-off between defence and growth rate in this natural phytoplankton community. I continued working with this data set in my third project focusing on ciliates, the main grazer of phytoplankton in spring. Boosted regression trees revealed that temperature and predators have the highest influence on net growth rates of ciliates. We finally investigated in my fourth project a food web model inspired by ciliates to explore the coexistence of plastic competitors and to study the new concept of maladaptive switching, which revealed some drawbacks of plasticity: faster adaptation led to higher maladaptive switching towards undefended phenotypes which reduced autotroph biomass and coexistence and increased consumer biomass.
It became obvious that even well-established models should be critically questioned as it is important not to forget reality on the way to a simplistic model. The results showed furthermore that long-term data sets are necessary as they can help to disentangle complex natural processes. Last, one should keep in mind that the interplay between models and experiments/ field data can deliver fruitful insights about our complex world.
The Andes are a ~7000 km long N-S trending mountain range developed along the South American western continental margin. Driven by the subduction of the oceanic Nazca plate beneath the continental South American plate, the formation of the northern and central parts of the orogen is a type case for a non-collisional orogeny. In the southern Central Andes (SCA, 29°S-39°S), the oceanic plate changes the subduction angle between 33°S and 35°S from almost horizontal (< 5° dip) in the north to a steeper angle (~30° dip) in the south. This sector of the Andes also displays remarkable along- and across- strike variations of the tectonic deformation patterns. These include a systematic decrease of topographic elevation, of crustal shortening and foreland and orogenic width, as well as an alternation of the foreland deformation style between thick-skinned and thin-skinned recorded along- and across the strike of the subduction zone. Moreover, the SCA are a very seismically active region. The continental plate is characterized by a relatively shallow seismicity (< 30 km depth) which is mainly focussed at the transition from the orogen to the lowland areas of the foreland and the forearc; in contrast, deeper seismicity occurs below the interiors of the northern foreland. Additionally, frequent seismicity is also recorded in the shallow parts of the oceanic plate and in a sector of the flat slab segment between 31°S and 33°S. The observed spatial heterogeneity in tectonic and seismic deformation in the SCA has been attributed to multiple causes, including variations in sediment thickness, the presence of inherited structures and changes in the subduction angle of the oceanic slab. However, there is no study that inquired the relationship between the long-term rheological configuration of the SCA and the spatial deformation patterns. Moreover, the effects of the density and thickness configuration of the continental plate and of variations in the slab dip angle in the rheological state of the lithosphere have been not thoroughly investigated yet. Since rheology depends on composition, pressure and temperature, a detailed characterization of the compositional, structural and thermal fields of the lithosphere is needed. Therefore, by using multiple geophysical approaches and data sources, I constructed the following 3D models of the SCA lithosphere: (i) a seismically-constrained structural and density model that was tested against the gravity field; (ii) a thermal model integrating the conversion of mantle shear-wave velocities to temperature with steady-state conductive calculations in the uppermost lithosphere (< 50 km depth), validated by temperature and heat-flow measurements; and (iii) a rheological model of the long-term lithospheric strength using as input the previously-generated models.
The results of this dissertation indicate that the present-day thermal and rheological fields of the SCA are controlled by different mechanisms at different depths. At shallow depths (< 50 km), the thermomechanical field is modulated by the heterogeneous composition of the continental lithosphere. The overprint of the oceanic slab is detectable where the oceanic plate is shallow (< 85 km depth) and the radiogenic crust is thin, resulting in overall lower temperatures and higher strength compared to regions where the slab is steep and the radiogenic crust is thick. At depths > 50 km, largest temperatures variations occur where the descending slab is detected, which implies that the deep thermal field is mainly affected by the slab dip geometry.
The outcomes of this thesis suggests that long-term thermomechanical state of the lithosphere influences the spatial distribution of seismic deformation. Most of the seismicity within the continental plate occurs above the modelled transition from brittle to ductile conditions. Additionally, there is a spatial correlation between the location of these events and the transition from the mechanically strong domains of the forearc and foreland to the weak domain of the orogen. In contrast, seismicity within the oceanic plate is also detected where long-term ductile conditions are expected. I therefore analysed the possible influence of additional mechanisms triggering these earthquakes, including the compaction of sediments in the subduction interface and dehydration reactions in the slab. To that aim, I carried out a qualitative analysis of the state of hydration in the mantle using the ratio between compressional- and shear-wave velocity (vp/vs ratio) from a previous seismic tomography. The results from this analysis indicate that the majority of the seismicity spatially correlates with hydrated areas of the slab and overlying continental mantle, with the exception of the cluster within the flat slab segment. In this region, earthquakes are likely triggered by flexural processes where the slab changes from a flat to a steep subduction angle.
First-order variations in the observed tectonic patterns also seem to be influenced by the thermomechanical configuration of the lithosphere. The mechanically strong domains of the forearc and foreland, due to their resistance to deformation, display smaller amounts of shortening than the relatively weak orogenic domain. In addition, the structural and thermomechanical characteristics modelled in this dissertation confirm previous analyses from geodynamic models pointing to the control of the observed heterogeneities in the orogen and foreland deformation style. These characteristics include the lithospheric and crustal thickness, the presence of weak sediments and the variations in gravitational potential energy.
Specific conditions occur in the cold and strong northern foreland, which is characterized by active seismicity and thick-skinned structures, although the modelled crustal strength exceeds the typical values of externally-applied tectonic stresses. The additional mechanisms that could explain the strain localization in a region that should resist deformation are: (i) increased tectonic forces coming from the steepening of the slab and (ii) enhanced weakening along inherited structures from pre-Andean deformation events. Finally, the thermomechanical conditions of this sector of the foreland could be a key factor influencing the preservation of the flat subduction angle at these latitudes of the SCA.
To investigate the reliability and stability of spherical harmonic models based on archeo/-paleomagnetic data, 2000 Geomagnetic models were calculated. All models are based on the same data set but with randomized uncertainties. Comparison of these models to the geomagnetic field model gufm1 showed that large scale magnetic field structures up to spherical harmonic degree 4 are stable throughout all models. Through a ranking of all models by comparing the dipole coefficients to gufm1 more realistic uncertainty estimates were derived than the authors of the data provide.
The derived uncertainty estimates were used in further modelling, which combines archeo/-paleomagnetic and historical data. The huge difference in data count, accuracy and coverage of these two very different data sources made it necessary to introduce a time dependent spatial damping, which was constructed to constrain the spatial complexity of the model. Finally 501 models were calculated by considering that each data point is a Gaussian random variable, whose mean is the original value and whose standard deviation is its uncertainty. The final model arhimag1k is calculated by taking the mean of the 501 sets of Gauss coefficients. arhimag1k fits different dependent and independent data sets well. It shows an early reverse flux patch at the core-mantle boundary between 1000 AD and 1200 AD at the location of the South Atlantic Anomaly today. Another interesting feature is a high latitude flux patch over Greenland between 1200 and 1400 AD. The dipole moment shows a constant behaviour between 1600 and 1840 AD.
In the second part of the thesis 4 new paleointensities from 4 different flows of the island Fogo, which is part of Cape Verde, are presented. The data is fitted well by arhimag1k with the exception of the value at 1663 of 28.3 microtesla, which is approximately 10 microtesla lower than the model suggest.
Predator-prey interactions provide central links in food webs. These interaction are directly or indirectly impacted by a number of factors. These factors range from physiological characteristics of individual organisms, over specifics of their interaction to impacts of the environment. They may generate the potential for the application of different strategies by predators and prey. Within this thesis, I modelled predator-prey interactions and investigated a broad range of different factors driving the application of certain strategies, that affect the individuals or their populations. In doing so, I focused on phytoplankton-zooplankton systems as established model systems of predator-prey interactions.
At the level of predator physiology I proposed, and partly confirmed, adaptations to fluctuating availability of co-limiting nutrients as beneficial strategies. These may allow to store ingested nutrients or to regulate the effort put into nutrient assimilation. We found that these two strategies are beneficial at different fluctuation frequencies of the nutrients, but may positively interact at intermediate frequencies. The corresponding experiments supported our model results. We found that the temporal structure of nutrient fluctuations indeed has strong effects on the juvenile somatic growth rate of {\itshape Daphnia}.
Predator colimitation by energy and essential biochemical nutrients gave rise to another physiological strategy. High-quality prey species may render themselves indispensable in a scenario of predator-mediated coexistence by being the only source of essential biochemical nutrients, such as cholesterol. Thereby, the high-quality prey may even compensate for a lacking defense and ensure its persistence in competition with other more defended prey species.
We found a similar effect in a model where algae and bacteria compete for nutrients. Now, being the only source of a compound that is required by the competitor (bacteria) prevented the competitive exclusion of the algae. In this case, the essential compounds were the organic carbon provided by the algae. Here again, being indispensable served as a prey strategy that ensured its coexistence.
The latter scenario also gave rise to the application of the two metabolic strategies of autotrophy and heterotrophy by algae and bacteria, respectively. We found that their coexistence allowed the recycling of resources in a microbial loop that would otherwise be lost. Instead, these resources were made available to higher trophic levels, increasing the trophic transfer efficiency in food webs.
The predation process comprises the next higher level of factors shaping the predator-prey interaction, besides these factors that originated from the functioning or composition of individuals. Here, I focused on defensive mechanisms and investigated multiple scenarios of static or adaptive combinations of prey defense and predator offense. I confirmed and extended earlier reports on the coexistence-promoting effects of partially lower palatability of the prey community. When bacteria and algae are coexisting, a higher palatability of bacteria may increase the average predator biomass, with the side effect of making the population dynamics more regular. This may facilitate experimental investigations and interpretations. If defense and offense are adaptive, this allows organisms to maximize their growth rate. Besides this fitness-enhancing effect, I found that co-adaptation may provide the predator-prey system with the flexibility to buffer external perturbations.
On top of these rather internal factors, environmental drivers also affect predator-prey interactions. I showed that environmental nutrient fluctuations may create a spatio-temporal resource heterogeneity that selects for different predator strategies. I hypothesized that this might favour either storage or acclimation specialists, depending on the frequency of the environmental fluctuations.
We found that many of these factors promote the coexistence of different strategies and may therefore support and sustain biodiversity. Thus, they might be relevant for the maintenance of crucial ecosystem functions that also affect us humans. Besides this, the richness of factors that impact predator-prey interactions might explain why so many species, especially in the planktonic regime, are able to coexist.
Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are an innovative group of drugs with increasing clinical importance in oncology, combining high specificity with generally low toxicity. There are, however, numerous challenges associated with the development of mAbs as therapeutics. Mechanistic understanding of factors that govern the pharmacokinetics (PK) of mAbs is critical for drug development and the optimisation of effective therapies; in particular, adequate dosing strategies can improve patient quality life and lower drug cost. Physiologically-based PK (PBPK) models offer a physiological and mechanistic framework, which is of advantage in the context of animal to human extrapolation. Unlike for small molecule drugs, however, there is no consensus on how to model mAb disposition in a PBPK context. Current PBPK models for mAb PK hugely vary in their representation of physiology and parameterisation. Their complexity poses a challenge for their applications, e.g., translating knowledge from animal species to humans.
In this thesis, we developed and validated a consensus PBPK model for mAb disposition taking into account recent insights into mAb distribution (antibody biodistribution coefficients and interstitial immunoglobulin G (IgG) pharmacokinetics) to predict tissue PK across several pre-clinical species and humans based on plasma data only. The model allows to a priori predict target-independent (unspecific) mAb disposition processes as well as mAb disposition in concentration ranges, for which the unspecific clearance (CL) dominates target-mediated CL processes. This is often the case for mAb therapies at steady state dosing.
The consensus PBPK model was then used and refined to address two important problems:
1) Immunodeficient mice are crucial models to evaluate mAb efficacy in cancer therapy. Protection from elimination by binding to the neonatal Fc receptor is known to be a major pathway influencing the unspecific CL of both, endogenous and therapeutic IgG. The concentration of endogenous IgG, however, is reduced in immunodeficient mouse models, and this effect on unspecific mAb CL is unknown, yet of great importance for the extrapolation to human in the context of mAb cancer therapy.
2) The distribution of mAbs into solid tumours is of great interest. To comprehensively investigate mAb distribution within tumour tissue and its implications for therapeutic efficacy, we extended the consensus PBPK model by a detailed tumour distribution model incorporating a cell-level model for mAb-target interaction. We studied the impact of variations in tumour microenvironment on therapeutic efficacy and explored the plausibility of different mechanisms of action in mAb cancer therapy.
The mathematical findings and observed phenomena shed new light on therapeutic utility and dosing regimens in mAb cancer treatment.
This study presents the development of 1D and 2D Surface Evolution Codes (SECs) and their coupling to any lithospheric-scale (thermo-)mechanical code with a quadrilateral structured surface mesh.
Both SECs involve diffusion as approach for hillslope processes and the stream power law to reflect riverbed incision. The 1D SEC settles sediment that was produced by fluvial incision in the appropriate minimum, while the supply-limited 2D SEC DANSER uses a fast filling algorithm to model sedimantation. It is based on a cellular automaton. A slope-dependent factor in the sediment flux extends the diffusion equation to nonlinear diffusion. The discharge accumulation is achieved with the D8-algorithm and an improved drainage accumulation routine. Lateral incision enhances the incision's modelling. Following empirical laws, it incises channels of several cells width.
The coupling method enables different temporal and spatial resolutions of the SEC and the thermo-mechanical code. It transfers vertical as well as horizontal displacements to the surface model. A weighted smoothing of the 3D surface displacements is implemented. The smoothed displacement vectors transmit the deformation by bilinear interpolation to the surface model. These interpolation methods ensure mass conservation in both directions and prevent the two surfaces from drifting apart.
The presented applications refer to the evolution of the Pamir orogen. A calibration of DANSER's parameters with geomorphological data and a DEM as initial topography highlights the advantage of lateral incision. Preserving the channel width and reflecting incision peaks in narrow channels, this closes the huge gap between current orogen-scale incision models and observed topographies.
River capturing models in a system of fault-bounded block rotations reaffirm the importance of the lateral incision routine for capturing events with channel initiation. The models show a low probability of river capturings with large deflection angles. While the probability of river capturing is directly depending on the uplift rate, the erodibility inside of a dip-slip fault speeds up headward erosion along the fault: The model's capturing speed increases within a fault.
Coupling DANSER with the thermo-mechanical code SLIM 3D emphasizes the versatility of the SEC. While DANSER has minor influence on the lithospheric evolution of an indenter model, the brittle surface deformation is strongly affected by its sedimentation, widening a basin in between two forming orogens and also the southern part of the southern orogen to south, east and west.
Adipositas ist eine chronische Erkrankung mit erheblichen Komorbiditäten und Folgeschäden, die bereits im Kindes- und Jugendalter weit verbreitet ist. Unterschiedliche Faktoren sind an der Ätiologie dieser Störung beteiligt. Die Ernährung stellt dabei eine der Hauptsäulen dar, auf welche immer wieder Bezug genommen wird. Der Einfluss der Eltern auf die kindliche Ernährung spielt unbestritten eine zentrale Rolle – hinsichtlich genetischer Dispositionen, aber auch als Gestalter der Lebensumwelten und Vorbilder im Ernährungsbereich. Die vorliegende Arbeit hat zum Ziel, Übereinstimmungen elterlicher und kindlicher Ernährung zu untersuchen und dabei zu prüfen, inwiefern Prozesse des Modelllernens für die Zusammenhänge verantwortlich zeichnen. Grundlage ist die sozial-kognitive Theorie Albert Banduras mit dem Fokus auf seinen Ausführungen zum Beobachtungs- oder Modelllernen. Die Zusammenhänge elterlicher und kindlicher Ernährung wurden anhand einer Stichprobe 7 – 13-jähriger adipöser Kinder und ihrer Eltern in Beziehung gesetzt zu den Bedingungen des Modelllernens, die zuvor auch in anderen Studien gefunden worden waren. Eine hohe Ähnlichkeit oder gute Beziehung zwischen Modell (Mutter bzw. Vater) und Lernendem (Kind) sollte demnach moderierend auf die Stärke des Zusammenhangs wirken. Aus Banduras Ausführungen zu den Phasen des Modelllernens ergibt sich zudem ein dritter Aspekt, der in das Untersuchungsmodell einbezogen wurde. Die von Bandura postulierte Aneignungsphase setzt voraus, dass das zu lernende Verhalten auch beobachtet werden kann. Aus diesem Grund sollte die Analyse von Zusammenhängen im Verhalten nicht losgelöst von der Zeit betrachtet werden, die Modell und Beobachter miteinander verbringen bzw. verbracht haben. Zudem wurde die Wahrnehmung eines Elternteils als Vorbild beim Kind erfragt und als Moderator aufgenommen. In die Analysen eingeschlossen wurden vollständige Mutter-Vater-Kind-Triaden. Im Querschnitt der Fragebogenerhebung waren die Daten von 171 Mädchen und 176 Jungen, in einem 7 Monate darauf folgenden Längsschnitt insgesamt 75 Triaden (davon 38 Mädchen) enthalten. Es zeigte sich ein positiver Zusammenhang zwischen der kindlichen und mütterlichen Ernährung ebenso wie zwischen der kindlichen und väterlichen Ernährung. Die Übereinstimmungen zwischen Mutter und Kind waren größer als zwischen Vater und Kind. Überwiegend bestätigt werden konnten der moderierende Einfluss der Beziehungsqualität und der Vorbildwahrnehmung auf die Zusammenhänge elterlicher und kindlicher gesunder Ernährung und der Einfluss gemeinsam verbrachter Zeit vor allem in Bezug auf Vater-Kind-Zusammenhänge problematischer Ernährung. Der väterliche Einfluss, der sowohl in Studien als auch in präventiven oder therapeutischen Angeboten oft noch vernachlässigt wird und in vorliegender Arbeit besondere bzw. gleichberechtigte Beachtung fand, zeigte sich durch den Einbezug moderierender Variablen verstärkt. Eine Ansprache von Müttern und Vätern gleichermaßen ist somit unbedingtes Ziel bei der Prävention und Therapie kindlicher Adipositas. Auch jenseits des Adipositaskontextes sollten Eltern für die Bedeutung elterlicher Vorbildwirkung sensibilisiert werden, um eine gesunde Ernährungsweise ihrer Kinder zu fördern.
Systems of Systems (SoS) have received a lot of attention recently. In this thesis we will focus on SoS that are built atop the techniques of Service-Oriented Architectures and thus combine the benefits and challenges of both paradigms. For this thesis we will understand SoS as ensembles of single autonomous systems that are integrated to a larger system, the SoS. The interesting fact about these systems is that the previously isolated systems are still maintained, improved and developed on their own. Structural dynamics is an issue in SoS, as at every point in time systems can join and leave the ensemble. This and the fact that the cooperation among the constituent systems is not necessarily observable means that we will consider these systems as open systems. Of course, the system has a clear boundary at each point in time, but this can only be identified by halting the complete SoS. However, halting a system of that size is practically impossible. Often SoS are combinations of software systems and physical systems. Hence a failure in the software system can have a serious physical impact what makes an SoS of this kind easily a safety-critical system. The contribution of this thesis is a modelling approach that extends OMG's SoaML and basically relies on collaborations and roles as an abstraction layer above the components. This will allow us to describe SoS at an architectural level. We will also give a formal semantics for our modelling approach which employs hybrid graph-transformation systems. The modelling approach is accompanied by a modular verification scheme that will be able to cope with the complexity constraints implied by the SoS' structural dynamics and size. Building such autonomous systems as SoS without evolution at the architectural level --- i. e. adding and removing of components and services --- is inadequate. Therefore our approach directly supports the modelling and verification of evolution.
Complete protection against flood risks by structural measures is impossible. Therefore flood prediction is important for flood risk management. Good explanatory power of flood models requires a meaningful representation of bio-physical processes. Therefore great interest exists to improve the process representation. Progress in hydrological process understanding is achieved through a learning cycle including critical assessment of an existing model for a given catchment as a first step. The assessment will highlight deficiencies of the model, from which useful additional data requirements are derived, giving a guideline for new measurements. These new measurements may in turn lead to improved process concepts. The improved process concepts are finally summarized in an updated hydrological model. In this thesis I demonstrate such a learning cycle, focusing on the advancement of model evaluation methods and more cost effective measurements. For a successful model evaluation, I propose that three questions should be answered: 1) when is a model reproducing observations in a satisfactory way? 2) If model results deviate, of what nature is the difference? And 3) what are most likely the relevant model components affecting these differences? To answer the first two questions, I developed a new method to assess the temporal dynamics of model performance (or TIGER - TIme series of Grouped Errors). This method is powerful in highlighting recurrent patterns of insufficient model behaviour for long simulation periods. I answered the third question with the analysis of the temporal dynamics of parameter sensitivity (TEDPAS). For calculating TEDPAS, an efficient method for sensitivity analysis is necessary. I used such an efficient method called Fourier Amplitude Sensitivity Test, which has a smart sampling scheme. Combining the two methods TIGER and TEDPAS provided a powerful tool for model assessment. With WaSiM-ETH applied to the Weisseritz catchment as a case study, I found insufficient process descriptions for the snow dynamics and for the recession during dry periods in late summer and fall. Focusing on snow dynamics, reasons for poor model performance can either be a poor representation of snow processes in the model, or poor data on snow cover, or both. To obtain an improved data set on snow cover, time series of snow height and temperatures were collected with a cost efficient method based on temperature measurements on multiple levels at each location. An algorithm was developed to simultaneously estimate snow height and cold content from these measurements. Both, snow height and cold content are relevant quantities for spring flood forecasting. Spatial variability was observed at the local and the catchment scale with an adjusted sampling design. At the local scale, samples were collected on two perpendicular transects of 60 m length and analysed with geostatistical methods. The range determined from fitted theoretical variograms was within the range of the sampling design for 80% of the plots. No patterns were found, that would explain the random variability and spatial correlation at the local scale. At the watershed scale, locations of the extensive field campaign were selected according to a stratified sample design to capture the combined effects of elevation, aspect and land use. The snow height is mainly affected by the plot elevation. The expected influence of aspect and land use was not observed. To better understand the deficiencies of the snow module in WaSiM-ETH, the same approach, a simple degree day model was checked for its capability to reproduce the data. The degree day model was capable to explain the temporal variability for plots with a continuous snow pack over the entire snow season, if parameters were estimated for single plots. However, processes described in the simple model are not sufficient to represent multiple accumulation-melt-cycles, as observed for the lower catchment. Thus, the combined spatio-temporal variability at the watershed scale is not captured by the model. Further tests on improved concepts for the representation of snow dynamics at the Weißeritz are required. From the data I suggest to include at least rain on snow and redistribution by wind as additional processes to better describe spatio-temporal variability. Alternatively an energy balance snow model could be tested. Overall, the proposed learning cycle is a useful framework for targeted model improvement. The advanced model diagnostics is valuable to identify model deficiencies and to guide field measurements. The additional data collected throughout this work helps to get a deepened understanding of the processes in the Weisseritz catchment.