A research group led by Wouter Buytaert
We are a research group based at Imperial College London, focusing on sustainable water resources management. We deal with the entire toolchain from data collection, process understanding, simulation and prediction, to decision-support. Some applications include assessing and predicting the impact of climate change and land-use changes on water resources, quantifying ecosystem services, developing integrated hydro-ecological simulation systems, and uncertainty analysis.
We work predominantly in tropical regions such as the South-American Andes (Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile), the African rift (Ethiopia), and south Asia (India and Nepal), but we are also involved in projects in the UK and Europe. We work extensively with universities in all continents (well, except Antarctica), as well as policy institutes, governments, NGO’s and local stakeholders.
Featured projects
Diagnosing controls of pollution hot spots and hot moments and their impact on catchment water quality
Planetary boundaries of river water pollution are at risk of being breached, with dangerous consequences for human and environmental health, economic prosperity, and water security. This project pioneers innovations in experimental analytics, data science and mathematical modelling to yield new mechanistic understanding of the dynamic drivers of multi-contaminant pollution hotspots (spaces) and hot moments (times) in a changing water world.
The diagnosis of the impact of these locations and periods when average pollution conditions are far exceeded on large scale and long-term river basin water quality is critical to inform local and global adaptation and mitigation strategies for river pollution and develop interventions to keep within a safe(r) ‘operating space’ and improve water quality for people and the environment.
Funded by: Natural Environment Research Council (UK) Led by: Prof. Stefan Krause, University of Birmingham
Water security and climate change adaptation in Peruvian glacier-fed river basins (RAHU)
Successive glacier shrinkage combined with high human vulnerabilities and low adaptive capacities increasingly raise serious concerns about long-term water security in the tropical Andes. RAHU uses the Vilcanota-Urubamba Basin in southern Peru as a case study to monitor glacier-ecosystem-livelihood interactions with a broad consortium of local partners and policy stakeholders in order to implement robust adaptation strategies. Imperial is in charge of the hydrological catchment monitoring and overall project coordination.
Funded by: Natural Environment Research Council (UK) and CONCYTEC (Peru)
More projects can be found on our projects page