Project Work Packages

WP1 – Management and Coordination

The WP is concerned with the overall financial, administrative and operational management of the project as well as coordinating activities across work packages. The project coordination of UNICA will be carried out through meetings for sharing partner results, and stakeholder observations and recommendations. For speeding the coordination activity all social and fast communication media will be used.

WP2 – Experimental fields and watersheds: a new transnational Mediterranean watershed monitoring network.

Monitoring is planned in the watersheds and agrosilvopastoral systems. Some fields are already instrumented and some will be instrumented during the project. At the basin scale precipitation, runoff, sm, Ts and vegetation will be monitored using also remote sensing information. At the field scale the sites are or will be instrumented with eddy covariance (EC) towers to measure water, CO2 and energy balances. In some of the fields geophysics methods and rootsapflow sensors will be used.Data will be shared through an internet database, which will be open access.

WP3 – Ecohydrological modelling

Innovative spatially distributed versions that couple LSM-VDM and rainfall-runoff hydrologic models for simulating also runoff propagation at the basin scale will be developed. Models will be calibrated and validated at the field and basin scales (WP2). The model will be coupled with remote sensing observations (WP4) for surface flux and ET estimates. A model intercomparison will allow to identify the vegetation, climate and land use features crucial for the correct determination of the key ecohydrological variables.

WP4 – Remote sensing and data assimilation

The estimate of vegetation indices and Ts will be obtained from images of ASTER, NOAAAVHRR, SEVIRI and SENTINEL. Ts and LAI estimates from remote sensing will be tested with the observations of the field campaigns. The remote sensing observations and monitoring results will be used for developing a DA system. We will evaluate if the assimilation of LAI and Ts is enough for guiding the models and if there is the need of a minimum frequency of assimilation or a minimum spatial resolution of the images.

WP5 – Analysis of land cover change strategies and climate change scenarios

Future climate scenarios will be generated starting from historical climate data perturbed following the IPCC future climate scenarios of the Fifth Assessment report. We will use an opportunely adapted stochastic generator for accounting the unstationarity of the climate processes and the climate changes.

WP6 – Development of water management and planning systems

The results of WP5 will be input of multipurpose and multiuser water resources management system, which will be improved for reaching OB7. Water resources management optimization models (WARGI by UNICA, Hec-ResPRM, and others) will be applied and improved to define the economic efficiency and the optimal water allocation in the water system configurations throughout the evaluation of multiple planning and management rules.

WP7 – Quantifying benefits and sharing methodologies with stakeholders and dissemination

In this WP we will: organize start-up stakeholder meetings in all case studies to tap into the knowledge and experience of all local stakeholders and fine-tune the planning of the monitoring and modeling activities; conduct participatory seminaries; identify acceptable scenarios in view of simulated impacts; conduct participatory seminaries for discussing possible configurations; share methodological developments; deliver results and disseminate outcomes