Global Assessment of Water Stress in Karst Regions in a changing world
Work Package 2: Field campaign
WP2 is the work package that deals with the conduction of the field campaigns at the 5 Karst Experimental Laboratories. It needs a thoughtful strategy to identify the locations for the soil moisture probes and the sampling locations for the soil water isotopes that allows for capturing the local variability of heterogeneity in the soil at the five karst experimental laboratories (KELs) of the project. As they are located within strongly differing regions, the scale of “local” may vary according to the particular characteristics of the KELs. Similar to monitoring processes at the hillslope scale the extent of the monitoring network has to be adapted to the expected scale of processes variability.
WP2 is the work package that deals with the conduction of the field campaigns at the 5 Karst Experimental Laboratories. It needs a thoughtful strategy to identify the locations for the soil moisture probes and the sampling locations for the soil water isotopes that allows for capturing the local variability of heterogeneity in the soil at the five karst experimental laboratories (KELs) of the project. As they are located within strongly differing regions, the scale of “local” may vary according to the particular characteristics of the KELs. Similar to monitoring processes at the hillslope scale the extent of the monitoring network has to be adapted to the expected scale of processes variability.
Location of study sites
As the focus of WP2 is the monitoring of the heterogeneity of soil moisture dynamics and soil water isotopes that arises from the heterogeneity of dissolution formed karst landforms typical features as dolines have to be included. The size of those features may vary from several square meters to several hundreds of meters. Reviewing the KELs and contacting the local PIs will allow for estimating the typical scale to apply an experimental setup that includes the necessary degree of randomization and replication. At each site 30 locations will be chosen to install soil moisture probes (SMT100) at three depths (~ -10/-30/-50 cm), each triplet connected to a data logger (UMS EM50). Hence, a approximately total number of 450 soil moisture probes will be installed at 150 locations across the 5 KELs (depending on the local conditions).
Global Karst Monitoring Program
In May 2018 the field team consisting of Andreas, Romane, Tunde and Ben started with the experimental set-up of the global karst monitoring program. They have been installing ~500 soil moisture probes in 5 different climate regions to study evapotranspiration and recharge processes in karst.
In May 2018 the field team consisting of Andreas, Romane, Tunde and Ben started with the experimental set-up of the global karst monitoring program. They have been installing ~500 soil moisture probes in 5 different climate regions to study evapotranspiration and recharge processes in karst.
Research project funded by the German Research Foundation
