PhD: The link between mountains, downstream agriculture and ecosystems globally

Are you interested in the role of mountains in the global hydrological cycle? And in what happens to downstream water supply when mountains change? Do you like working with numerical models? Then this PhD might be your next step!

A large part of the freshwater that sustains human societies is generated in the mountains. The seasonal melting of snow and ice supports agriculture, industries, households and the environment downstream. However, mountainous regions are changing rapidly, as they are hit hard by climate change. The impact of these changes on downstream water users is poorly understood. Global hydrological models rarely account for complex mountain processes. However, understanding how mountain processes influence global water availability is important to address sustainable water use.

We are looking for a PhD student who is interested in the link between changing mountain processes and increasing water use downstream. This position is part of the project ‘MountAInWater’ in which a consortium of international, interdisciplinary researchers collectively aims to answer the question How is the water supply from the world’s mountain ranges changing and which non-linear feedbacks may cause unprecedented societal impacts?

As a PhD student at Wageningen University you will apply a large scale hydrology-crop model in river basins that are originating from snow and ice covered mountains.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• Analyse how missing complex mountain processes in global precipitation products and hydrological models affect water availability estimates.
• Quantify the importance of mountainwater for agriculture and ecosystems globally, by analyzing how meltwater flows interact with crop growing seasons and environmental flow requirements in basins with large irrigation demand and high meltwater flows.
• Run the hydrology-crop model in combination with mountain streamflow (from high resolution mountain hydrology models) for selected basins to analyse mountain water contributions to downstream river flow, agricultural water use, and sustaining ecosystems for hotspot areas.
• Using a global mountain reanalysis dataset to evaluate for all mountain areas globally their contribution to downstream river flows, agriculture and ecosystems.

You will publish your research findings in high ranking scientific journals and present it at conferences.

You will also be asked to contribute occasionally to education, by helping in the supervision of MSc students that work on their thesis projects, and supporting in courses.

You will work here
The research is embedded within the chair Water Systems and Global Change. You will be supervised by Prof. Dr. Hester Biemans, Dr. Manoj Khaniya and a third supervisor tbd.