Project

iCRAG

Scaling evapotranspiration (ET) from plant to catchment level under present and future climate: Implications for water resources and flooding

 This 4-year project is funded by the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) through the SFI-Research Centre in Applied Geosciences (iCRAG) under the Earth System Change research programme.

This project focuses on the role that vegetation type (land use categories) and behaviour (ecophysiology) plays on streamflow and runoff historically, today and in the near future under climate change. It aims to bring together unique cross-disciplinary understanding from the plant sciences and catchment hydrology to characterize better the properties of vegetation and vegetation responses to global change that impact evapotranspiration and runoff. This study will use existing datasets generated by Prof. Jennifer McElwain’s lab on different plant species’ resistances to water loss to improve catchment hydrology models regularly used in Prof. Laurence Gill’s lab. The significant outcomes of this research will be:

  1. The better attribution studies on the impact of past vegetation change on historical trends in Irish and international stream flow and
  2. Improved future predictions of water resource availability and flood risk for Irish catchments.

Team members:

Dr Sate Ahmad