Projects

Ongoing projects

Seminar on sustainable energy cooperation: an insight into some of our ongoing projects.

Enhancing resilience of mountain ecosystems

In mountain regions climate change and anthropogenic impacts will impact on fragile ecosystems and valuable water resources. Our projects aim at contributing to resilience based management of natural resources. In particular modeling approaches allow us to project impacts and provide adequate solutions to anticipate changes. See our projects on:

Panta Rhei – Everything Flows

Resilience-based management of natural resources: the fundamental role of water and soil in functional ecosystems

http://distart119.ing.unibo.it/pantarhei/sites/default/files/wg25.pdf

Model calibration: data availability vs model complexity

In this project we extended our work on using satellite snow cover images, glacier mass balances and discharge data to calibrate a physically based hydrological data (see Finger et al. 2011) to conceptual and lumped models. We demonstrated that the use of multiple data sets is more important than model complexity to make simulations mode realistic.

Tracer experiments to assess melt water flow paths

Retreating glacier threaten the water availability in mountain areas. In order to identify areas of greater risk we performed tracer experiments in the Swiss Alps and assessed the climate change impacts on water availability in mountain valleys.

 

See the report on our experiments on the national Swiss television...

http://www.srf.ch/play/tv/einstein/video/farbiges-gletscherwasser-zeigt-abfluesse?id=223221ef-b86c-4ba1-addc-06c2c18f950a

Modeling climate change impacts on water resources

Within the framework of the EU/FP7 ACQWA Project we assessed future water resources in alpine regions by running climate change projections of water availability for hydro-power production


Within the Swiss Experiment we developed a data exchange platform for Swiss research institutions