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Unravelling the mysterious role of groundwater in Ecosystem Dynamics
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Edited by Agnès Rivière, Konstantina Katsanou, Jean Marçais
Groundwater's strategic importance for ecosystems (biodiversity, and societies) is gaining prominence. Groundwaters play a critical role in natural cycles, redistributing water, energy and matter in the subsurface and sustaining surface water bodies and ensuring related biodiversity. Overall groundwater is key for continental areas, by providing essential ecosystem services hence ensuring water, energy, and food security. Groundwater dynamics significantly impact ecosystems. Non-stationarity of groundwater systems dynamics under global changes put these ecosystems at threat. Therefore, it is key to characterise ecosystem-groundwater interrelationships by studying the quantitative and qualitative impacts of ecosystems on groundwater resources through a wide range of tools, such as characterising transit and residence times of water and elements in groundwater systems, as well as the vegetation-atmosphere-unsaturated zone interactions with aquifers, which enable quantification of aquifer recharge and stream-aquifer exchanges. Hydrogeological models are pivotal tools to characterise and anticipate potential change of these relationships between ecosystems and groundwater. However, due to extreme heterogeneity of environmental processes and parameters, and our inability to fully characterise thisheterogeneity, all hydrogeological models need to be calibrated against relevant geological, geophysical, hydrogeochemical and hydrological data to improve robustness of predictions and reduce model uncertainty. Critical Zone Observatories provide long-term, spatially detailed information on groundwater resources, enabling in-depth studies that consider the interplay of territorial changes together with climate change. These observatories therefore provide opportunities to identify key processes driving changes at local or regional scales. Installed in heterogeneous environments, observatories consider different aquifer types at different geographical areas and reflect the interplay between land uses, climate zones, and human pressures on the dynamics of groundwater resources in ecosystems changing. This session seeks to highlight innovative approaches that integrate field data with advanced modelling techniques to deepen the understanding of complex hydrological, hydrogeological, and ecohydrological systems under the impact of global change.
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