Hydrology, biogeochemistry and metabolism in a semi-arid mediterranean coastal wetland ecosystem.

A LOICZ Budget Model is applied to the Ichkeul Lake, a wetland ecosystem of the South Mediterranean-North African region, to evaluate its functioning in order to boost water management. The Ichkeul Lake water and nutrient budget, net ecosystem metabolism (NEM), nutrient availability, and their seasonal changes are estimated using field data. A considerable anthropogenic-driven amount of nitrogen is transferred into N/NO to the atmosphere during the dry season with predominance of denitrification-anammox processes.

Groundwater monitoring for assessing artificial recharge in the Mediterranean coastal aquifer of Korba (Northeastern Tunisia).

Groundwater (GW) artificial recharge with treated wastewater (TWW) is seen as a promising technical solution to overcome groundwater overexploitation and seawater intrusion and to ascertain future water resources availability. While these introduced recharge systems have shown positive impacts in many areas across the world, their effective contribution to GW recharge is still not well quantified in water-stressed regions such as Tunisia. The scarcity of on-site data with accurate temporal and spatial measurements and resolution in such areas hinders the clear assessment of these recharge systems' performances.

Assessment of Agriculture Pressures Impact on the Joumine River Water Quality Using the PEGASE Model.

The protection of the aquatic environment while managing the risk of water scarcity in the Mediterranean region is challenging. Ensuring future sustainability of water resources needs improved monitoring networks and early warning system of future trends of water quality. A specific concern is given to nonpoint source pollution from agriculture, which is often the main source of water quality degradation in rivers.

Valuing scarce observation of rainfall variability with flexible semi-distributed hydrological modelling - Mountainous Mediterranean context.

To represent spatial and temporal variability in rainfall adequately, rainfall-runoff models must compromise among modelling objectives, data availability, conceptualization options, and the actual variability in rainfall. This is of utmost importance for challenges of integrated water management in the rapidly changing Mediterranean context. We evaluated the sensitivity of the SWAT model to combinations of spatial rainfall variability and catchment subdivision in a data-scarce mesoscale mountainous Mediterranean context.

Modelling climate change impacts on and adaptation strategies for agriculture in Sardinia and Tunisia using AquaCrop and value-at-risk.

In Europe, there is concern that climate change will cause significant impacts around the Mediterranean. The goals of this study are to quantify the economic risk to crop production, to demonstrate the variability of yield by soil texture and climate model and to investigate possible adaptation strategies. In the Rio Mannu di San Sperate watershed, located in Sardinia (Italy) we investigate production of wheat, a rainfed crop.

Quantifying hydrological responses of small Mediterranean catchments under climate change projections.

Catchment flow regimes alteration is likely to be a prominent consequence of climate change projections in the Mediterranean. Here we explore the potential effects of climatic change on the flow regime of the Thau and the Chiba catchments which are located in Southern France and Northeastern Tunisia, respectively. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) hydrological model is forced with projections from an ensemble of 4 climate model (CM) to assess changes and uncertainty in relevant hydrological indicators related to water balance, magnitude, frequency and timing of the flow between a reference (1971-2000) and future (2041-2071) periods.

Modeling water quality to improve agricultural practices and land management in a tunisian catchment using the soil and water assessment tool.

Agriculture intensification has impaired water quality. In this study, the risk of pollution by nitrates was assessed by experimental monitoring, spatial integration of farm census, and modeling of water quality using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), version 2009, over the period of 1990 to 2006 for a catchment located northern Tunisia. Under a semiarid climate, the water quality is influenced by the predominating agriculture activities.