impaCt of climatE and Land usE change on Soil and waTer rEsources

The project will disentangle the impact of land use and climate change on the degradation of water and soil resources. Therefore, it will couple a historical analysis used for the calibration and validation of methods (including river monitoring, sediment fingerprinting and erosion modelling), before the simulation of future scenarios using the validated model. It will rely on a series of “school catchments” representative of contrasted environments and already monitored by the project participants in the different countries. The main goal is to train the next-generation of researchers to this suite of well-established and novel techniques through the creation of an international research network to expand capacities to deal with the impact of climate change on soil and water resources, which threatens food, agrofuel and hydroelectric power production capacities in both France and South America.

impact of climate, land use, CELESTE, water/soil degradation

The development of this project will contribute to improve the knowledge of the impact of climate and land use change on water/soil degradation and to disentangle their respective impacts, which is absolutely crucial to design effective management strategies. Moreover, the analysis of the results will be useful to evaluate and discuss the sustainability of the currently implemented farming practices. This is of key importance to address the issue of data scarcity regarding this process in South America, to evidence land degradation with specific data obtained in-situ