An Italian initiative led by the National Research Council
In a period where climate extremes like #droughts are always more frequent and severe, understanding the interactions between #carbon and #water cycles is vital to reduce the impact of these extremes on #water and #ecosystem.
This is the main objective of the project Waterstem, a project funded in 2022 by the Italian Ministry of Education and led by the National Research Council.
In Waterstem we study different aspects related to forest and pasture ecosystems and their interactions with the hydrological cycle during periods of low precipitation and high temperature like meteorological droughts. The project sees the participation of different researchers from:
- the Italian National Research Council CNR-IRPI Hydrology as project leader as well as CNR-IBE and CNR-ISAFOM with the Forest Modelling Lab;
- the DAGRI of the University of Florence;
- the University of Basilicata;
- the Department of Environmental, Biological and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Technologies (DiSTABIF) – University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli;
- the Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering of the University of Trento with https://abouthydrology.blogspot.com/.
Waterstem started in May 2022 and produced already important contributions in the literature. In the project, different expertise work together using latest development of experimental data from a critical zone network, satellite data, land surface and forest models.
Last week the project partners met in Perugia in Central Italy for the midterm meeting of the project discussing about progresses in droughts, forests reponses, runoff formation analyses and not only… food and wine was also an important recurrent topic!!
