The anthropogenic climate changes are becoming more and more evident in the form of more extreme weather conditions influencing catchments and freshwaters, resulting in higher water temperatures, more water and floodings, increased nutrient leaching and transport, eutrophication of lakes with more frequent toxic algae blooms and threat of extinction of important indicator cold water species.
Knowledge of climate and its impact on the freshwater ecosystem and the ability and skills to model and describe possible changes are a prerequisite for understanding and combining complex relationships between catchments and freshwater ecosystems. Furthermore, theoretical knowledge of the effect of various adaptation strategies is important to analyse the ability of society to counteract undesired effects. Course offered by the National Environmental Research Institute, AU.
Period
08-08-2011 - 19-08-2011 (2 weeks)
Target group
The participants must have knowledge of catchments and freshwater ecosystems, for instance via the courses aquatic ecology, agro-ecological analysis and management at regional scale or the impacts of agriculture on wetlands.
Course aim
At the end of the course the student should be able to:- To theorise on the impacts on freshwater ecosystems by climate changes.- To discuss and analyse prognoses from the Global Climate Models for climate changes.- To analyse and downscale climate data for local use in catchments. - To analyse statistical trends in long time series of data on freshwater ecosystems. - To analyse catchment effects and effects on freshwaters induced by climate changes using different tools of analysis such as empirical models, NAM, SWAT and lake models. - To theorise and discuss potential adaptation strategies at various scales.- To sum up the results from the theoretical and practical experiments in a final report.
Credits
5.0 ECTS credits
Course fee
EUR 0. See website for information on fees
Course leader
Brian Kronvang, Aarhus University
Aarhus University International Centre
Address: Hoeg Guldbergs Gade 4, building 1650 Aarhus C
Postal code: 8000
City: Aarhus
Country: Denmark
Website: http://www.au.dk/summeruniversity
E-mail: SummerUniversity@adm.au.dk
Phone: +45 8942 2320
Climate changes and adaptations in the management of catchments and fresh waters
