A physicist by training, James Kirchner has worked in fields ranging from hydrology, aqueous geochemistry, and geomorphology to evolutionary ecology and paleobiology. Much of his current work focuses on the flow, chemistry, and geomorphology of mountain streams.
He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Dartmouth College, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a member of the Berkeley faculty from 1991 through 2010, most recently as the Goldman Distinguished Professor for the Physical Sciences and Director of Berkeley’s Central Sierra Field Research Stations.
He is currently the Professor for the Physics of Environmental Systems at ETH Zurich, the Swiss federal technical university, where he teaches hydrology and environmental fluid mechanics. From 2007 to 2012 he served as the director of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL), where he supervised a scientific staff of 550, and where he remains as a senior scientist.
He became a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2008. He was the European Geosciences Union’s 2013 Bagnold Medalist (for fundamental contributions to geomorphology) and the American Geophysical Union’s 2016 Langbein Lecturer (for lifetime contributions to hydrology).
Landscapes receive water from precipitation and then transport, store, mix, and release it, both downward to streams and upward to vegetation. How they do this shapes floods, droughts, biogeochemical cycles, contaminant transport, and the health of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Because many of the key processes occur invisibly in the subsurface, our conceptualization of them has often relied heavily on physical intuition. In recent years, however, much of this intuition has been overthrown by field observations and emerging measurement methods, particularly involving isotopic tracers. I will summarize key surprises that have transformed our understanding of hydrological processes at the scale of hillslopes and drainage basins. These surprises have forced a shift in perspective from process conceptualizations that are relatively static, homogeneous, linear, and stationary to ones that are predominantly dynamic, heterogeneous, nonlinear, and nonstationary.
As time permits, I will also outline new methods for quantifying landscapes’ nonlinear and nonstationary behavior directly from observational data. These methods reveal that some catchments exhibit much more nonstationary and/or nonlinear behavior than others do. They also show that some catchments exhibit strong spatial heterogeneity in their response to precipitation, resulting from spatial heterogeneity in land use and subsurface characteristics. Results from this approach may be informative for catchment characterization and runoff forecasting; they may also lead to a better understanding of short-term storage dynamics and landscape-scale connectivity.
]]>The presentations and high-level conferences are designed to share the practices and experiences of managers of waterways or river ports, transport operators, engineering companies, in particular on innovative topics.
Visit https://www.smartrivers2022.com for more information.
]]>ISE 2022 covers a wide spectrum of topics related to ecohydraulics in theory and in practice, including the hydrological, hydraulic, morphodynamic, structural, ecologic, biologic, and technical aspects of the discipline. Six high-profile keynote speeches will be presented.
For more details, please visit https://ise2022.org.
]]>Full information is availiable here
]]>Water lies at the heart of life and well-being, yet it is a finite resource which is quickly outpaced by the global demand in rapid growth. The UN SDG 6 aims at “availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”, prioritising the importance of water security and sustainability in the societal and environmental welfare. However, such welfare is challenged by the current water availability. On a global scale, more than two billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress. In China, 30% of its land area is suffering from high or extremely high water stress. About two thirds of Chinese cities are having problems sustaining sufficient water supply. Therefore properly managed water has a major stake in the future. Global changes are bringing immensely profound impacts to the earth system and hence the future.
Under a warming climate, extreme events like floods and droughts are staged at an increased intensity and frequency. The rising sea level poses major threat of coastal flooding, and impacts estuary systems drastically. These changes also stagger the ecological systems with symptoms such as biodiversity loss and rapid degradation. The success and resilience of water management is highly dependant on our technical innovations and institutional capacities. We need to change our ways of thinking, living and managing to adapt to such global changes.
In 2015 and 2017, two Forums on water security and sustainability have been held in Nanjing, attracting attention of researchers both in China and around the world. Hence, YICODE, HHU and NHRI, sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Engineering, are proudly announcing the 3rd Forum of the series in 2020 to continue our discussion on water security and sustainability. We sincerely hope this could provide an open, frank, productive and multi-disciplinary forum for researchers and practitioners in the field. Researchers and practitioners around the globe are welcome to take part in the two-day discussion from cross-cutting perspectives.
The Forum will be held in Nanjing, China on 16 to 19 November 2020. More details of venue and programmes will be announced later.
We are inviting researchers and practitioners around the world in the water sector to submit abstracts for presentation (in English, no less than 500 words). Please see the official website for more guidelines for submission. The submission system will be open until 15 July 2020.
Email: estds@nhri.cn
Official website: https://estds.yicode.ac
Contact: Chunhui Lu, David Zhou