Adaptation to Drought and Extremes: The Surface-Soil-Groundwater Buffer under Climate Stress (ADAPT)
ADAPT aims to investigate the effect of climate change management scenarios to counteract the increasingly prevalent water deficits during summer droughts in Germany and central Europe. Specifically, the project seeks to delineate a safe path for the use of treated wastewater as a resource for irrigating agriculture, and to quantify the effect of hydromorphological management approaches to improve water retention, that can, ultimately, enhance groundwater recharge. Irrigation with treated wastewater will increase the load of micropollutants in the environment and thereby potentially negatively affect naturally occurring filtration processes in the soil-groundwater continuum. Our goal is to merge expertise across a broad spectrum of geoscience and environmental engineering disciplines to improve the removal of micropollutants from wastewater and quantify the resilience of soils and aquifers.
The project, led by the University of Kassel in partnership with the Justus Liebig University of Giessen is funded by the Hessian Ministry of Science's LOEWE program as part of the 18th LOEWE funding phase.
Research clusters
- Targeted development of chemical analytical methods for quantifying micropollutants in environmental samples
- Improved micropollutants elimination: Further development of multi-barrier systems in water treatment
- Model-based evaluation of hydromorphological management to promote water retention and groundwater recharge
Principal investigators: Prof. Dr. Tobias Morck, Prof. Dr. Stephan Theobald (Kassel) and Prof. Dr. Gerd Hamscher (Giessen).
- Environmental fate (retention, mobilization, breakthrough) of micropollutants in soils under the influence of extreme climate conditions
- Inhibition of natural nutrient cycles due to compounded drought and micropollutant stress on microbial communities in the subsurface
- Resilience-promoting measures for optimized soil-plant management in agricultural systems under the influence of climate and micropollutant contamination
Principal investigators: Prof. Dr. Adrian Mellage, Prof. Dr. Matthias Gassmann, Prof. Dr. Miriam Athmann, Dr. Margita Hefner (Kassel) and Prof. Dr. Sylvia Schnell (Giessen).
- Integrated soil function under climate stress and further development of mechanistic soil-plant models
- Water quality at the catchment scale
- Groundwater recharge under climate stress scenarios and hydromorphological adaptation measures
Principal investigators: Prof. Dr. Tobias Weber, apl. Prof. Dr. Christine Wachendorf, Prof. Dr. Matthias Gassmann, Prof. Dr. Stephan Theobald, and Dr. Lysander Bresinsky (Kassel)