Camilo del Río

• Pontifical Catholic University of Chile

Water scarcity is a rising issue in fast-growing cities in arid lands, where demand outpaces supply. This leads to non-renewable water systems and exacerbates social inequalities. This is the case for Alto Hospicio (AH), located in the northern Chilean Atacama Desert. Regarding its water availability, the main source of drinking water comes from un...

Motivated by the need to find complementary water sources in (semi-)arid regions, we develop and assess an observation-driven model to calculate fog-harvesting water potential. We aim to integrate this model with routine meteorological data collected under complex meteorological and topographic conditions to characterize the advective fog phenomeno...

Citation: Albornoz, F.; Vilches, I.; del Río, C.; Carter, V. Soilless Production of Lettuce (Lactuca sativa) in the Atacama Desert Using Fog Water: Water Quality and Produce Mineral Composition. Horticulturae 2024, 10, 957. https://doi. Abstract: Soilless vegetable production in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile is spreading since it is perceive...

In (semi-)arid regions, harvesting fog and dew can become a complementary solution to traditional water supply. In the Atacama region, a territory of key and water-dependent economic activities, both fog and dew are driven by the advection of marine moisture from the Pacific. Still, little is described regarding the dynamics and water potential of...

Agricultural production in the Atacama Desert is restricted by extreme aridity and poor soil quality. Between 18°S and 30°S, low stratocumulus clouds regularly cover the southeastern Pacific Ocean reaching the Coastal Cordillera. Thus, marine fog is constantly present in the coastal areas of the desert. Fog can be harvested using fog collectors. Ho...

City-regions in sensitive environmental spaces such as globally recognized biodiversity hotspots face the challenge of adopting land use planning strategies that facilitate the transition towards sustainability. Though landscape-scale patterns of land use changes have already been documented in central Chile, a critical spatial assessment of the dy...

Animal burrowing activity affects soil texture, bulk density, soil water content, and redistribution of nutrients. All of these parameters in turn influence sediment redistribution, which shapes the earth's surface. Hence it is important to include bioturbation into hillslope sediment transport models. However, the inclusion of burrowing animals in...

In our study, we included bioturbation into a soil erosion model and ran the model for several years under two conditions: With and without bioturbation. We validated the model using several sediment fences in the field. We estimated the modelled sediment redistribution and surface runoff and the impact of bioturbation on these along a climate grad...

Burrowing animals influence surface microtopography and hillslope sediment redistribution, but changes often remain undetected due to a lack of automated high-resolution field monitoring techniques. In this study, we present a new approach to quantify microtopographic variations and surface changes caused by burrowing animals and rainfall-driven er...

The grit crust is a recently discovered, novel type of biocrust made of prokaryotic cyanobacteria, eukaryotic green algae, fungi, lichens and other microbes that grow around and within granitoid stone pebbles of about 6 mm diameter in the Coastal Range of the Atacama Desert, Chile. The microbial community is very well adapted towards the extreme co...

Unique fog ecosystems that occur inland along the Chilean coastal desert are dominated by Tillandsia landbeckii. The average annual precipitation in this hyperarid area lies below 1 mm per year. Tillandsia are specialized in the foliar uptake of fog as a main source of water. The detailed mapping of the distribution of Tillandsia is lacking, making...

Marine stratocumulus clouds of the eastern Pacific play an essential role in the earth's energy and radiation budget. Parts of these clouds off the western coast of South America form the major source of water to the hyperarid Atacama Desert coastal region at the northern coast of Chile. For the first time, a full year of vertical structure observa...

Marine stratocumulus clouds of the Eastern Pacific play an essential role in the Earth's energy and radiation budget. Parts of these clouds off the west coast of South America form the major source of water to the hyper-arid Atacama Desert coastal region at the northern coast of Chile. For the first time, a full year of vertical structure observati...

Burrowing animals influence surface microtopography and hillslope sediment redistribution, but changes often remain undetected due to a lack of autonomous high resolution field monitoring techniques. In this study we present a new approach to quantify microtopographic variations and surface changes caused by burrowing animals and rainfall-driven er...

The interplay between plants and soil drives the structure and function of soil microbial communities. In water-limited environments where vascular plants are often absent and only specialized groups of rootless plants grow, this interaction could be mainly asymmetric, with plants supporting nutrients and resources via litter deposition. In this st...

Despite the extensive area covered by the coastal Atacama fog Desert (18–32° S), there is a lack of understanding of its most notorious characteristics, including fog water potential, frequency of fog presence, spatial fog gradients or fog effect in ecosystems, such as Tillandsia fields. Here we discuss new meteorological data for the foggiest seas...

The hyperarid Atacama Desert coast receives scarce moisture inputs mainly from the Pacific Ocean in the form of marine advective fog. The collected moisture supports highly specialized ecosystems, where the bromeliad Tillandsia landbeckii is the dominant species. The fog and low clouds (FLCs) on which these ecosystems depend are affected in their i...

Studying fog requires a good understanding of both its horizontal and vertical distributions. Among these two, the vertical one is the most challenging to observe. Different methods have been adopted for observing this variable, among which the most commonly used are satellite datasets, together with airborne and meteorological surface observations...

• Ecosystem dry limits have been studied in the context of species biology, fitness, and interactions with biotic and abiotic parameters, but the interactive effects of these parameters remain underexplored. Therefore, information on the putative effects of global climate change on these ecosystems is often lacking. • We analyzed the interplay betw...

The Atacama Desert is well known for its arid and hyper-arid conditions; nevertheless, in the coastal Atacama, where the extended low stratocumulus clouds cover over the southeast Pacific Ocean meets the Coastal Cordillera it produces a highly dynamic advective marine fog. This fog is a major feature of the local climate, which provides humidity an...

El presente trabajo efectúa una revisión, sistematización y análisis de la conflictividad judicial de aguas en Chile en el periodo 2009-2018. Luego de recopilar un conjunto de sentencias definitivas pronunciadas durante ese lapso por los Tribunales Ordinarios Superiores de Justicia (Cortes de Apelaciones y/o Corte Suprema), se seleccionaron y carac...

The northern Chilean Atacama Desert is among those regions on Earth where life exists at its dry limits. There is almost zero rainfall in its core zone, and the only source of water is a spatio-temporally complex fog system along the Pacific coast, which is reaching far into the hyperarid mainland. Hardly any vascular plants grow in these areas, an...

Increased concern surrounding energy production as well as environmental issues in Chile, boosted the demand for clean and renewable energies, such as the solar one. The spatial-temporal influences of topography and the attenuation of solar radiation by cloud cover are analyzed in order to estimate which territories have higher solar energy potenti...

El presente artículo se focaliza en la ordenación de las aguas a escala local, particularmente, en las ordenanzas dictadas por las Municipalidades en Chile. Con ese propósito, se efectúa una sistematización y análisis de ordenanzas municipales que incluyen disposiciones o medidas en materia de recursos hídricos, vigentes al año 2017 en tres regione...

Fog water represents an alternative, abundant and currently unexploited fresh water resource in the coastal Atacama Desert (~20°S). Here, the stratocumulus clouds meet the Coastal Cordillera, producing highly dynamic advective marine fog, a major feature of the local climate that provides water to a hyper-arid environment. One of the main issues th...

Considering the increase of water and energy requirements in arid zones, this work combine the presence of the coastal stratocumulus as a potential water resource and the behavior of solar radiation as an energy source. The aim is to know the relationships between attenuation of irradiance by fog typology (orographic or advective) and the yields of...

In the coastal Atacama Desert in Northern Chile plant growth is constrained to so-called ‘fog oases’ dominated by monospecific stands of the genus Tillandsia. Adapted to the hyperarid environmental conditions, these plants specialize on the foliar uptake of fog as main water and nutrient source. It is this characteristic that leads to distinctive m...

In the coastal Atacama Desert in Northern Chile plant growth is constrained to so-called ‘fog oases’ dominated by monospecific stands of the genus Tillandsia. Adapted to the hyperarid environmental conditions, these plants specialize on the foliar uptake of fog as main water and nutrient source. It is this characteristic that leads to distinctive m...

UNESCO biosphere reserves are territories especially suited as laboratories for sustainability. They form a network of more than 600 units worldwide, intended to be key sites for harmonization of the nature-culture interface in the wide diversity of ecosystems existing on Earth. This mission is especially challenging in territories with high levels...

El desierto de atacama es uno de los lugares con mayor potencial en el mundo para el desarrollo de plantas solares de energía. Se estima que se podrían obtener 228 mil Mw en esta zona, lo que lo hace bastante atractivo, considerando la meta de incorporar energías renovables no convencionales (ERNC) a la matriz energética del país. Martín Farías y C...