Erhu Du

• Professor
• Professor at Hohai University

It is imperative to understand the interconnectedness of water use and hydrological impacts for water policy design underlying varying hydrological conditions across space and over time. However, such analysis remains difficult, constrained by the lack of appropriate modeling tools that fully integrate water policies, water use, and hydrological pr...

Water markets are considered as effective mechanisms to support efficient use of limited water resources and to increase crop production in agricultural systems. This study presents an agent-based modeling (ABM) framework to explore the performance of an agricultural water market under the joint influence of water permit allocation and farmers’ beh...

Analyzing river basins as coupled human and hydrological systems is important to advance our understanding of hydrological processes, and to provide insights into policy design for water resources management. However, assessing spatially heterogeneous and temporally dynamic characteristics of human-hydrological interactions remains a challenge, and...

Flood warnings from various information sources are important for individuals to make evacuation decisions during a flood event. In this study, we develop a general opinion dynamics model to simulate how individuals update their flood hazard awareness when exposed to multiple information sources, including global broadcast, social media, and observ...

Agricultural water markets are considered effective instruments to mitigate the impacts of water scarcity and to increase crop production. However, previous studies have limited understanding of how farmers' behaviors affect the performance of water markets. This study develops an agent-based model to explicitly incorporate farmers' behaviors, name...

Interconnected river‐lake systems are much more complex than either one due to their interactions. The Poyang Lake‐Yangtze River system has received much attention due to the reverse flow from the Yangtze River, which blocks the flow of Poyang Lake and causes extensive inundation. However, a less explored perspective is the backwater effects of lak...

Data uncertainty affects the accuracy of pollution source detection (PSD), particularly in the background of low‐cost water quality sensing and low‐accuracy data challenge. This study aims to develop a novel PSD method to use low‐accuracy sensor data, namely, the method of coupled forward data Assimilation and inverse Optimization in PSD (A&O‐PSD)....

High-dam reservoirs can significantly affect nutrient cycling processes across the globe. However, the research community now has two contradictive views (i.e. retention versus transformation) about the impact of high-dam reservoirs on nutrient cycling due to incomplete information obtained from limited field samplings. To resolve this issue, we de...

Groundwater contamination induced by anthropogenic activities has long been a global issue. Characterizing and modeling contaminant transport processes is crucial to groundwater protection and management. However, challenges still exist in process complexity, data constraint, and computational cost. In the era of big data, the growth of machine lea...

Study region: The Yiluo River Basin (YLRB), China Study focus: Understanding the alterations in drought propagation under evolving environmental conditions is crucial for the efficient management of water resources. In this study, the 'simu-lation-observation' comparison method was employed to analyze the drought propagation in distinct periods: ba...

The Yellow River Basin faces water scarcity and ecological fragility. Changes on the land surface, characterized by large‐scale soil and water conservation measures, have a significant impact on river runoff and ecological environment. However, there are still great uncertainties in the scientific understanding of the mechanisms by which multiple d...

In many flood-prone areas, it is essential for emergency responders to use advanced computer models to assess flood risk and develop informed flood evacuation plans. However, previous studies have had a limited understanding of how evacuation performance is affected by the arrangement of evacuation shelters (with respect to their number and geograp...

Groundwater depletion, typically caused by the distributed pumping activities of multiple stakeholders (i.e., water users) that share a hydrologically connected aquifer, has led to severe environmental and ecological problems in many river basins worldwide. Conventionally, the effects of pumping on aquifer depletion are quantified using well hydrau...

In many flood-prone areas, it is essential for emergency responders to use advanced computer models to assess flood risk and develop informed flood evacuation plans. However, previous studies have limited understanding of how evacuation performances are affected by the arrangement of evacuation shelters regarding their number and geographical distr...

The emergence of the cellulosic bioeconomy requires not only adequate technological, economic, and policy advances, but also effective communication and coordination among the multiple stakeholders in the bioeconomy community. Aiming to facilitate stakeholder communication and collaboration for cellulosic bioeconomy growth, an agent-based model is...

The design of groundwater exploitation schedules with constraints on pumping-induced land subsidence is a computationally intensive task. Physical process-based groundwater flow and land subsidence simulations are high-dimensional, nonlinear, dynamic and computationally demanding, as they require solving large systems of partial differential equati...

Antibiotic use in crops is an emerging concern, however, human exposure to antibiotics residues through consumption of plant-derived food has generally been neglected. This study is a comprehensive evaluation based on full consideration of exposure sources and analysis for nearly 100 antibiotics. A total of 58 antibiotic compounds were detected in...

Groundwater models are critical for simulating subsurface hydrological processes, guiding informed policy-making for groundwater management. However, the widely applied groundwater models typically use regular-shaped grids to discretize aquifer systems and require that the directions of the grid edges are aligned with the hydraulic conductivity ten...

Understanding farmers’ decision-making on crop choices and water use is essential for agricultural water resource management. However, previous studies have limited understanding of how farmers’ behavioral characteristics affect their crop choices and water use in agricultural systems. To fill this research gap, in this study we develop an agent-ba...

Modeling agriculture-impacted hydrological processes remains a challenge, as information on irrigation activities is often insufficient. This study developed modules for emulating high-resolution irrigation activities and representing water management policies in integrated hydrologic modeling. The new modeling approach was implemented in China's s...

In the outbreak of infectious diseases such as COVID-19, social media channels are important tools for the public to obtain information and form their opinions on infection risk, which can affect their disease prevention behaviors and the consequent disease transmission processes. However, there has been a lack of theoretical investigation into how...

Floods are usually highly destructive, which may cause enormous losses to lives and property. It is, therefore, important and necessary to develop effective flood early warning systems and disseminate the information to the public through various information sources, to prevent or at least mitigate the flood damages. For flood early warning, novel...