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[button type=”big”] Groundwater Resilience to Climate Change and High Pressure within an IWRM Approach (GRECPIMA)[/button]

In Mediterranean countries, groundwater has become over the past few decades, a fundamental resource for social, economic and environmental sustainability. There is also a need to integrate groundwater and surface water management. This project aims to develop collaborations allowing (i) to tackle some of the most crucial groundwater issues in the Mediterranean area, i.e. tourism development, urbanization, changes in agricultural practices, seawater intrusion, through three representative sites; (ii) to bring together multiple skills in science and technology in a consistent and promising way regarding groundwater issues, in particular GIS and remote sensing, climate change impacts and flow and transport modeling; and (iii) to deal with social and economic fields by involving stakeholders in Turkey, Algeria and France. The study sites are the region of Mugla in Turkey, the plain of Mitidja in Algeria and the region of Poitou in France. The project will associate three research teams with various domain expertise, which will allow to implement multiple scientific methods and technologies (hydrology, hydrogeology, climatology, data analysis, modeling, aerospace, IT), yet little used, especially by consulting firms. Mobilities will be provided between the partners to train project participants, including the youngest, to these scientific methods that are not yet included in the academic programs. Remote sensing will be used out extensively at the satellite scale and a much larger scale (Unmanned Air vehicle of the Turkey team). Soft-computing modeling (e.g. Neural Networks), still very little used, will be applied to long-term forecasts. Mathematical modeling will be also widely used in the project to quantify the flow and recharge, analyze surface water-groundwater interactions and analyze pollution issues. In addition, every steps of the project will include socio-economic aspects, which will be addressed by involving very closely the stakeholders from 3 countries.