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Project Topic
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Water stress becomes increasingly problematic due to various changes, including the increasing urbanization, land use changes, population growth and the increasing demand for (fresh) water. Climate change induces more variability and extremes in rainfall and temperature. This intensification of the water cycle will highly impact agriculture and forestry, especially in water-limited regions. The urgent need exists to assess and increase the resilience objectively is essential to mitigate the adverse effect of climate change. The combination of multiple trends, and the different temporal and spatial scales inherent to ecohydrology, result in a large variety of scenarios and high levels of uncertainty. Moreover, analyses must focus on both short and long term, and on small and large scales. These challenges impede the use of traditional techniques. Conventional process-based approaches cannot deal with the diversity of involved scales and data, ecosystems’ complexity and divergent objectives. Tailored solutions and support are needed to understands and increase the resilience of ecosystems and maximize water use efficiency and to, possibly, identify any opportunities. To overcome these issues, we propose the use of Big Data technology in combination with advanced data analyses techniques and flexible modelling approaches, which aims to unlock and exploit the full potential of data. Hereto, FORWARD combines Big Data, data mining and advanced analytics, with different model types (both data-driven and process-based). FORWARD develops and implements a full knowledge discovery database system for ecohydrological variables through simulations and quantitative cross-scale analyses of empirical and generated time series. Various data sources are combined and processed efficiently in a scalable and modular system. FORWARD will also provide a better understanding of the processes underlying resilience, resulting in new state-of-the-art indicators. Generalization of the methods and concepts is a key aspect in FORWARD, to ensure that the developed innovations can have a global impact. This is achieved through the use of diverse data sets, originating from different regions, climate types and ecohydrological conditions. The Big Data framework will be applied and fully implemented for a pilot zone. The Iberian Peninsula was selected due to its climatic and ecological diversity, which represents other European and other regions well. The consortium combines partners from industry and academia, having complementary expertise to ensure the best know-how and experience is present to maximize the potential impact and outcomes of the project. Generated datasets and gained understanding will be transferred to the general public, research community and other stakeholders. FORWARD aims to help public and private agents to improve water management understanding and operations in the context of climate variability, extremes and other trends. This will lead to an increased resilience of agriculture and forestry to these changes.
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