Department Water Resources and Drinking Water

The Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) is lead of the EU funded project HypoTRAIN (Hyporheic Zone Processes – A training network for enhancing the understanding of complex physical, chemical and biological process interactions). 16 PhD students all over Europe are currently working on individual sub-projects. The general topic is the degradation of micropollutants in river sediments (the so called hyporheic zones). The PhD students’ individual sub-projects are related to a lot of disciplines, like hydrology, biology, ecology, biogeochemistry, and modeling. In the video some of the doctoral candidates give an insight into their work.

Eawag is part of this training network and hosts 3 PhD students Andrea Betterle and Andrea Popp (Dep. W&T) and Jonas Mechelke (Dep. UChem).

Large-scale alterations of the hydrological cycle have dramatically altered the natural runoff and recharge characteristic of many rivers, making the management, supply, and protection of freshwater resources a complex, albeit important topic. In order to develop catchment‐wide solutions for predicting water surplus and shortage, it is necessary to understand how the overall hydrogeological system works. Conceptualizing the physical and chemical balance between surface water and groundwater holistically is crucial for the sustainable utilization and management of freshwater resources. For this, data, models and real-time monitoring systems are the key ingredients in the process of understanding and prediction, and subsequent improved management

This SNF funded project is looking at water distribution within the Thur River catchment, Switzerland. The project focuses on the management and development of an existing data platform (RECORD Catchment, FOEN, and Cantonal) for water quality and quantity, and the development of adaptive and event-based monitoring schemes for water characteristics. In this project, some of the decisions on experimental design will be based on the results of model development with the objective of developing a semi-distributed model based on areas of hydrological similarity (Hydrological Response Units - HRUs) for the purpose of determining water balance on a supra-regional scale.

Assessment and Modeling of Coupled Ecological and Hydrological Dynamics in the Restored Corridor of a River

River restoration is an essential tool to achieve "good ecological status” of water courses as required by European and Swiss legislation. Although the number of restoration projects has increased in recent years, scientific understanding of the underlying principles determining how hydromorphological variability in restored corridors of rivers relates to

• ecosystem functioning,
• biodiversity and
• water quality

is still limited. Our objective is to increase mechanistic understanding of coupled hydrological and ecological processes in near-river corridors. For this purpose, we are

• instrumenting a restored and a channelized section of the Swiss River Thur as large-scale field experimental sites, where we will quantify how the relevant variables influence (ground)water quality, ecosystem functioning and biodiversity;
• performing controlled experiments at the field sites and in the lab;
• developing process-based models of coupled hydrological, biogeochemical and ecological processes, facilitating transfer to other river systems undergoing restoration.

The project Swiss Experiment is a collabrative research platform des CCES (Competence Center for Environmental Sustainability) ot the  ETH domain. Goal is the development and implementation of sensors and methods with focus on automatisation of

• data generation
• linking meta data and monitoring data,
• data processing (validation, interpretation) and
• data visualisation.

These People worked in the Hydrogeology Group:

• Basso Stefano
• Betterle Andrea
• Bretzler Anja
• Chittoor Viswanathan Vidhya
• Diem Samuel
• Doulatyari Behnam
• Frank Corinna
• Garcia Perez Maria
• Ghasemizade Mehdi
• Hoffmann Lisa
• Kurth Anne-Marie 
• La Cecilia Daniele
• Minnig Morgane
• Popp Andrea
• Radny Dirk
• Ramgraber Max
• Vogt Tobias
• Von Freyberg Jana