David M. Hannah

University of Birmingham · School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

In‐situ dissolved organic matter (DOM) monitoring frequencies have often been chosen for convenience or based on perceived wisdom, without fully assessing their impact on representation of DOM dynamics. To address this gap, we collected 5‐min fluorescence data in an urban headwater and resampled it at coarser intervals to investigate the impact of...

Plain Language Summary Ensuring adequate water for people and ecosystems everywhere is a challenge because whilst water underpins all life and most activities, it is controlled by complex process that change in space and time. These properties make water difficult to understand and manage. However, they also mean that it connects global agendas lik...

We have witnessed and experienced increasing compound extreme events resulting from simultaneous or sequential occurrence of multiple events in a changing climate. In addition to a growing demand for a clearer explanation of compound risks from a hydrological perspective, there has been a lack of attention paid to socioeconomic factors driving and...

Managing complex disaster risks requires interdisciplinary efforts. Breaking down silos between law, social sciences, and natural sciences is critical for all processes of disaster risk reduction. This enables adaptive systems for the rapid evolution of AI technology, which has significantly impacted the intersection of law and natural environments...

River restoration practices are being increasingly implemented to help offset the global degradation of freshwater ecosystems. The ecological success of such projects is typically determined via post‐project appraisals comparing restored conditions against specified baselines (e.g., pre‐project and/or non‐restored data), but such approaches can ove...

Physical habitat modification is one of the main pressures affecting river environments, impacting their ecosystem health and compromising their ability to adapt to the effects of climate change. Addressing the impacts of physical modification through reinvigorating natural processes has become a globally established river restoration technique. He...

In the context of expected future melt reductions in the high-Andes, the buffering capacity of non-glacial stores, and especially of high-altitude bofedal wetlands, is of increasing importance. Isotope signatures potentially indicative of water undergoing evaporation on transit through bofedales have been found in the tropics, but end member uncert...

With mountainous topography and exposure to mid-latitude westerly storms causing frequent atmospheric river landfall and associated hydro-hazards, medium-range forecasting of extreme precipitation is a critical imperative for New Zealand. Here, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Extreme Forecast Index (EFI) is applied to two var...

Plain Language Summary Worldwide there are 700–800 million people at risk to schistosomiasis, a neglected water‐related parasitic disease. No known work has employed a vulnerability framework to comprehensively examine how climate change and the amplification of hydrological variability and extremes may influence a population's vulnerability to sch...

The notion of convergent and transdisciplinary integration, which is about braiding together different knowledge systems, is becoming the mantra of numerous initiatives aimed at tackling pressing water challenges. Yet, the transition from rhetoric to actual implementation is impeded by incongruence in semantics, methodologies, and discourse among d...

Water quality issues remain a major cause of global water insecurity, and real-time low-cost monitoring solutions are central to the remediation and management of water pollution. Optical sensors, based on fluorescence, absorbance, scattering and reflectance-based principles, provide effective water quality monitoring (WQM) solutions. However, subs...

In recent years, opportunities have opened up to develop and validate glacier models in regions that have previously been infeasible due to observation and/or computational constraints, due to the availability of globally-capable glacier evolution modelling codes and spatially-extensive geodetic validation data. The glaciers in the tropical Andes r...

To examine the relative controls of landscape and climate on spatial variability, we measured water level dynamics of shallow lakes over two decades that represent both the heterogeneity of surficial geology classifications, and thus the potential range in surface and groundwater connectivity, and the long‐term weather patterns of the Boreal Plain...

Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) dynamics are evolving in the rapidly changing Arctic and a comprehensive understanding of the controlling processes is urgently required. For example, the transport processes governing DOC dynamics are prone to climate-driven alteration given their strong seasonal nature. Hence, high-resolution and long-term studies a...

The accurate estimation of flood probability is crucial for designing water storage and flood retention structures. However, the assumption of identical distribution in flood samples is unrealistic, given the influence of various flood mechanisms. To address this challenge, we proposed a novel framework based on flood clustering and data pooling th...

Climate change has led to unprecedented environmental and socio-economic challenges globally, especially in vulnerable communities. Loss and damage refer to the residual effects of climate change, where adaptation and mitigation measures may not be enough to prevent adverse impacts. This study examines the impact of loss and damage caused by climat...

High river water temperature (T w) extremes have been widely reported during drought conditions as extreme low-flows often coincide with high atmospheric energy inputs. This has significant implications for freshwater ecosystem health and sustainable river management practices globally. However, the extent to which different meteorological and hydr...

Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) dynamics are evolving in the rapidly changing Arctic and a comprehensive understanding of the controlling processes is urgently required. For example, the transport processes governing DOC dynamics are prone to climate driven alteration given their strong seasonal nature. Hence, high-resolution and long-term studies a...

Tropical high‐Andean wetlands, locally known as ‘bofedales’, are key ecosystems sustaining biodiversity, carbon sequestration, water provision and livestock farming. Bofedales' contribution to dry season baseflows and sustaining water quality is crucial for downstream water security. The sensitivity of bofedales to climatic and anthropogenic distur...

Afforestation, as one of the major drivers of land cover change, has the potential to provide a wide range of ecosystem services. Aside from carbon sequestration, afforestation can improve hydrological regulation by increasing soil water storage capacity and reducing surface water runoff. However, afforested areas are rarely studied over time scale...

Developing a SMART flood early warning system for a mountain watershed involves integrating community input and accounting for rainfall variability and hydrological dynamics. By incorporating these factors, the system becomes more adaptive and accurate, enhancing its effectiveness in alerting communities to potential flood risks in a timely manner.

Urbanization and the increase in urban land cover are growing concerns associated with numerous negative impacts on surface water quality. Currently, many emerging contaminants are difficult to measure with no field deployable sensors currently available. Hence, discrete grab samples are required for subsequent laboratory analysis. To capture the s...

Resilience has been widely used as a concept to analyse, understand, and improve cities' coping capacities to disasters. However, it is still a challenge to operationalise and quantify resilience. This study proposes a framework for assessing resilience to disasters based on the relationship between disaster intensity and damage rate. We use intens...

Climate change and other human activities are modifying river water temperature globally. A more holistic understanding of river temperature dynamics in an integrated climate–land–hydrology–human framework is urgently needed for sustainable river management and adaptation strategies.

Floods remain a wicked problem and are becoming more destructive with widespread ecological, social, and economic impacts. The problem is acute in mountainous river catchments where plausible assumptions of risk behaviour to flood exposure and vulnerability are crucial. Inclusive approaches are required to design suitable flood early warning system...

Water security requires not only sufficient availability of and access to safe and acceptable quality for domestic uses, but also fair distribution within and across populations. However, a key research gap remains in understanding water security inequality and its dynamics, which in turn creates an impediment to tracking progress towards sustainab...

Despite continued interest in flow regime variability and its influence on stream dynamics in intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams, the link between different precipitation events and its control on water presence in hydrologically transient catchments with varying land cover and biophysical characteristics, has rarely been studied. This paper...

Improved monitoring of potable water is essential if we are to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically SDG6: to make clean water and sanitation available to all. Typically monitoring of potable water requires laboratory analysis to detect indicators of fecal pollution, such as thermotolerant coliforms (TTCs), Escherichia c...

Changes in the mountain cryosphere impact the water security of downstream societies and the resilience of water-dependent ecosystems and their services. However, assessing mountain water security requires better understanding of the complex interaction between glacial meltwater and coupled human–natural systems. In this context, we call for a refo...

Ecosystem health and water quality of rivers are dependent on their temperature. With ongoing human‐induced climate change causing increases in air temperature across the globe, it is anticipated the stream temperatures will rise too ‐ in turn increasing the rates of biogeochemical stream processes and potentially threatening the viability and heal...

The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual Medals and Awards recognise achievements in researching, communicating and teaching a wide range of geographical knowledge. The speeches and citations are a record of the 2022 celebrations, which occurred at the Society on 6 June 2022, with contributions from Sir David Hempleman‐Adams, Professor Dame...

Water security requires not only sufficient availability of and access to safe and acceptable quality for domestic uses, but also fair distribution within and across populations. However, a key research gap remains in understanding water security inequality and its dynamics, which in turn creates an impediment to tracking progress towards sustainab...

Floods remain a wicked-problem and are becoming more destructive with widespread ecological, social and economic impacts. The problem is particularly acute in modified formerly pristine, mountainous river-catchments where plausible assumptions of risk-behaviour relevant to flood exposure and vulnerability are crucial for robust early warning system...

This chapter provides an overview of current understanding of alpine lotic ecosystems. The global distribution of alpine streams is presented and links between climate and hydrology are discussed. The different stream types found in the alpine zone, associated habitat properties and the concept of dynamic water source contributions (e.g., snow, ice...

Machine learning (ML) applications in Earth and environmental sciences (EES) have gained incredible momentum in recent years. However, these ML applications have largely evolved in ‘isolation’ from the mechanistic, process‐based modelling (PBM) paradigms, which have historically been the cornerstone of scientific discovery and policy support. In th...

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A unified conceptual framework for river corridors requires synthesis of diverse site‐, method‐ and discipline‐specific findings. The river research community has developed a substantial body of observations and process‐specific interpretations, but we are still lacking a comprehensive model to distill this knowledge into fundamental transferable c...

Hyporheic zones increase freshwater ecosystem resilience to hydrological extremes and global environmental change. However, current conceptualizations of hyporheic exchange, residence time distributions, and the associated biogeochemical cycling in streambed sediments do not always accurately explain the hydrological and biogeochemical complexity o...

In river systems, headwater networks contain the vast majority of the stream length. Thus, climate and land‐use change in headwaters have disproportionate impacts on downstream ecosystems and societies that rely on them. Despite decades of hydrological research, difficulties in observing hydrological properties across scales means that scientific k...

Many of the current scenario studies on future water extremes do not seem to adequately address their emerging wickedness. Instead, they often focus on one of the extremes: floods or droughts or pollution, but not on the complexity of interlinkages between extremes. Also, very few studies seem to integrate the natural and the social science perspec...

Large river systems, such as the River Ganges (Ganga), provide crucial water resources for the environment and society, yet often face significant challenges associated with cumulative impacts arising from upstream environmental and anthropogenic influences. Understanding the complex dynamics of such systems remains a major challenge, especially gi...

The Southern Alps in the South Island of New Zealand are one of wettest places globally, making it critical to understand the mechanisms for delivery of extreme precipitation and river flooding. Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are recognized as key causes of extreme precipitation in New Zealand, but relatively little is known about their large‐scale meteo...

Transdisciplinary solutions are needed to achieve the sustainability of ecosystem services for future generations. We propose a framework to identify the causes of ecosystem function loss and to forecast the future of ecosystem services under different climate and pollution scenarios. The framework (i) applies an artificial intelligence (AI) time-s...

Managing water–human systems during water shortages or droughts is key to avoid the overexploitation of water resources and, in particular, groundwater. Groundwater is a crucial water resource during droughts as it sustains both environmental and anthropogenic water demand. Drought management is often guided by drought policies, to avoid crisis man...

This paper contributes to the study of collaborative governance (CG) - systems where autonomous actors work together around shared objectives using pooled resources to address a common goal. Among CG's claimed benefits are boosting actor capacities for transformative action and increasing their resilience to complex multi-scaled challenges such as...

Increasing river temperatures are a threat to cold water species including ecologically and economically important freshwater fish, such as Atlantic salmon. In 2018, ca. 70% of Scottish rivers experienced temperatures which cause thermal stress in juvenile salmon, a situation expected to become increasingly common under climate change. Management o...

The global increase of urban impervious land cover poses a significant threat to the integrity of river ecosystems. Hence, it is critical to assess the efficiency of green roofs (GR) to mitigate the negative impacts of urbanization on river ecosystems, such as thermal surges and pollutants. In this study, we evaluated the ecohydrological behaviour...

There is a no lack of significant open questions in the field of hydrology. How will hydrological connectivity between freshwater bodies be altered by future human alterations to the hydrological cycle? Where does water go when it rains? Or what is the future space-time variability of flood and drought events? However, the answers to these question...

Reliance on biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5) as an indicator of wastewater quality has hindered the development of efficient process control due to the associated uncertainty and lag-times. Surrogate measurements have been proposed, with fluorescence spectroscopy a promising technique. Yet, assessment of in-situ fluorescence sensors across multiple...

The uptake of aquatic nutrients can represent a major pathway for their removal from river ecosystems and is a key control on nitrogen and carbon export from watersheds. Our understanding of temporal variability in nutrient mass balance is incomplete as conventional methods for estimating uptake rates are suited to low-frequency analysis. Here, we...

We document a substantial increase in global N2O emissions from mangroves. Based on our analysis of two decades of mangrove N2O emission studies, we estimate N2O emission of 0.023 Tg N year−1 from global mangrove ecosystems. N2O fluxes from mangrove ecosystems are strongly increased by sediment dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) concentration trans...

A unified conceptual framework for river corridors requires synthesis of diverse site-, method- and discipline-specific findings. The river research community has developed a substantial body of observations and process-specific interpretations, but we are still lacking a comprehensive model to distill this knowledge into fundamental transferable c...

River flow characterizes the integrated response from watersheds, so it is essential to quantify to understand the changing water cycle and underpin the sustainable management of freshwaters. However, river gauging stations are in decline with ground-based observation networks shrinking. This study proposes a novel approach of estimating river flow...

Managing water-human systems in times of water shortage and droughts is key to avoid overexploitation of water resources, particularly for groundwater, which is a crucial water resource during droughts sustaining both environmental and anthropogenic water demand. Drought management is often guided by drought policies to avoid crisis management and...

Different sets of dry spell length such as complete series, monthly maximum, seasonal maximum, and annual maximum are applied and modeled with different probability distribution functions (such as Gumbel Max, generalized extreme value, Log-Logistic, generalized logistic, inverse Gaussian, Log-Pearson 3, generalized Pareto) to recognize in which dur...

The concept of environmental flows has been developed to manage human alteration of river flow regimes, as effective management requires an understanding of the ecological consequences of flow alteration. This study explores the concept of macroinvertebrate sensitivity to river flow alteration to establish robust quantitative relationships between...

Urban rivers worldwide are affected directly by macrophyte growth, causing reduced flow velocity and risks of flooding. Therefore, cutting macrophytes is a common management practice to ensure free drainage. The impacts of macrophyte removal on transient storage dynamics and microbial metabolic activity of wastewater-fed urban streams are unknown,...

The ecosystem services provided by forests modulate runoff generation processes, nutrient cycling and water and energy exchange between soils, vegetation and atmosphere. Increasing atmospheric CO2 affects many linked aspects of forest and catchment function in ways we do not adequately understand. Global levels of atmospheric CO2 will be around 40%...

Future changes in the occurrence of flood events can be estimated using multi-model ensembles to inform adaption and mitigation strategies. In the near future, these estimates could be used to guide the updating of exceedance probabilities for flood control design and water resources management. However, the estimate of return levels from ensemble...