Fernando Jaramillo

Stockholm University | SU · Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology

Deep learning and remote sensing techniques have significantly advanced water surface monitoring; however, the need for annotated data remains a challenge. This is particularly problematic in wetland detection, where water extent varies over time and space, demanding multiple annotations for the same area. In this paper, we present DeepAqua, a deep...

Lakes are valuable water resources that support aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and supply fresh water for the agricultural, industrial, and urban sectors worldwide. Although water levels should be tracked to monitor these services, conventional gauging is unfeasible in most lakes. This study applies Differential Interferometric Synthetic Apertu...

Despite their importance, wetland ecosystems protected by the Ramsar Convention are under pressure from climate change and human activities. These drivers are altering water availability in these wetlands, changing water levels or surface water extent, in some cases, beyond historical variability. Attribution of the effects of human and climate act...

Despite having approximately 100,000 lakes, Sweden has limited continuous gauged lake water level data. Although satellite radar altimetry (RA) has emerged as a popular alternative to measure water levels in inland water bodies, it has not yet been used to understand the large‐scale changes in Swedish lakes. Here, we quantify the changes in water l...

Transboundary assessments of water security typically adopt an ‘upstream’ perspective, focusing on hazards and vulnerabilities occurring within a given hydrological basin. However, as the moisture that provides precipitation in the hydrological basin probably originates ‘upwind’, hazards and vulnerabilities potentially altering the moisture supply...

Wetlands are valuable and diverse environments that contribute to a vast range of ecosystem services, such as flood control, drought resilience, and carbon sequestration. The provision of these ecosystem services depends on their hydrological functioning, which refers to how water is stored and moved within a wetland environment. Since the hydrolog...

Increasing climatic and human pressures are changing the world's water resources and hydrological processes at unprecedented rates. Understanding these changes requires comprehensive monitoring of water resources. Hydrogeodesy, the science that measures the Earth's solid and aquatic surfaces, gravity field, and their changes over time, delivers a r...

Monitoring lake water level fluctuations is critical for managing water resources, predicting the impacts of climatic change, and preserving ecosystem services lakes provide. However, traditional gauging stations are insufficient to monitor all lakes worldwide due to the large number of existing lakes, the challenges of installation and maintenance...

Lakes provide societies and natural ecosystems with valuable services such as freshwater supply and flood control. Water level changes in lakes reflect their natural responses to climatic and anthropogenic stressors; however, their monitoring is costly due to installation and maintenance requirements. With its advanced hardware and computational ca...

The loss of hydrological connectivity and fragmentation of natural wetlands are widespread drivers of wetland degradation. Understanding where and how natural connectivity is impaired is essential for managing, protecting and remediating these ecosystems. Wetland Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (Wetland InSAR) can provide information on su...

We bring together two decades of research on cross-scale spatial and temporal connectivity of water in the Anthropocene to understand the implications for institutional fit and water governance, with a focus on river basin organizations and watershed-based bodies. There is strong evidence showing how hydrological cycles are tightly coupled across l...

Sustainable groundwater use relies on adequate rates of groundwater recharge, which are expected to change with climate change. However, climate impacts on recharge remain uncertain due to a paucity of measurements of recharge trends globally. Here we leverage the relationship between climatic aridity and long-term recharge measurements at 5,237 lo...

Human actions compromise the many life-supporting functions provided by the freshwater cycle. Yet, scientific understanding of anthropogenic freshwater change and its long-term evolution is limited. Here, using a multi-model ensemble of global hydrological models, we estimate how, over a 145-year industrial period (1861–2005), streamflow and soil m...

Despite their importance, wetland ecosystems protected through the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands are under pressure from climate change and human activities. These drivers are altering water availability in these wetlands, changing water levels or surface extent, in some cases, beyond historical variability. Attribution of the effects of human and...

Plain Language Summary El Niño is recognized as a climate variability phenomenon with significant impacts on precipitation worldwide. However, the mechanisms behind these impacts are not fully understood. Here we use model simulations to argue that one of those mechanisms is the effect of El Niño on terrestrial moisture recycling (TMR), that is, th...

Groundwater resources are the most reliable freshwater supply in arid regions where many aquifers face dramatic depletion due to natural and anthropogenic causes. The annual average rate of decline of groundwater level is about 1.65 m. This research focuses on an aquifer that suffers from severe groundwater stress, and it aims to identify the main...

Identifying climate impacts on watershed water loss (evapotranspiration) generally involves the interactions with land surface change (e.g., vegetation dynamics and anthropogenic disturbances). Here, we seek to understand the compensating effects of climate and underlying characteristics on watershed evapotranspiration. In this regard, an analytica...

The global target to protect 30% of Earth’s land and ocean by 2030 has prompted governments to report their progress in biodiversity conservation. Announcements of countries reaching 30 % of conservation area are widely commended by the international community, despite signs of increasing pressures within protected areas, poor representativity of k...

The Budyko framework consists of a curvilinear relationship between the evaporative ratio (i.e., actual evaporation over precipitation) and the aridity index (i.e., potential evaporation over precipitation) and defines evaporation's water and energy limits. A basin's movement within the Budyko space illustrates its hydroclimatic change and helps id...

Several safe boundaries of critical Earth system processes have already been crossed due to human perturbations; not accounting for their interactions may further narrow the safe operating space for humanity. Using expert knowledge elicitation, we explored interactions among seven variables representing Earth system processes relevant to food produ...

The Magdalena River in Colombia is one of the world's largest (discharge = 7100 m3 s−1) tropical rivers, hosting > 170 aquatic vertebrate species. However, concise synthesis of the current ecological and environmental status is lacking. By documenting the anthropogenic stressors impacting the river on time scales ranging from centuries to decades,...

Human actions compromise the many life-supporting functions of the global freshwater cycle. Yet, an encompassing analysis of humanity’s aggregate impact on the freshwater cycle is still missing. We compare the current state of the freshwater cycle against a stable reference state by estimating the global area experiencing streamflow and soil moistu...

[Free access to the full text at: https://rdcu.be/cL78K] Green water — terrestrial precipitation, evaporation and soil moisture — is fundamental to Earth system dynamics and is now extensively perturbed by human pressures at continental to planetary scales. However, green water lacks explicit consideration in the existing planetary boundaries fra...

The 21st century has brought new challenges and opportunities and has also increased demands on the Nordic hydrological community. Our hydrological science focus and approaches need rethinking and adaptation to the changing requirements of society in response to climate change and human interventions, in search of more comprehensive and cross-disci...

In Uganda, upgrading smallholder agriculture is a necessary step to achieve the interlinked sustainable development goals of hunger eradication, poverty reduction and land degradation neutrality. However, targeting the right restoration practices and estimate their cost-benefit at the national scale is difficult given the highly contextual nature o...

Water bodies provide essential ecosystem services linked to morphometric features that might differ between natural lakes and reservoirs. We use the HydroLAKES global dataset to quantitatively compare large (area > 1 km²) reservoirs and natural lakes in terms of scaling exponents between morphometric measures (volume, area, shore length). These exp...

Monitoring water level changes is necessary to manage, conserve and restore natural, and anthropogenic lake systems. However, the in‐situ monitoring of lake systems is unfeasible due to limitations of costs and access. Furthermore, current remote sensing methods are restricted to large lakes and low spatial resolutions. We develop a novel approach...

Ongoing and future hydroclimatic changes have large environmental and societal impacts. In terrestrial ecosystems, these changes are usually described with the terms ‘wetter’ and ‘drier’, which refer to the change in the quantity and/or presence of water, either as water fluxes or stocks. We conducted a literature review of almost 500 recent climat...

The global hydrological cycle is characterized by complex interdependencies and self-regulating feedbacks that keep water in an ever-evolving state of flux at local, regional, and global levels. Increasingly, the scale of human impacts in the Anthropocene is altering the dynamics of this cycle, which presents additional challenges for water governa...

Several safe boundaries of critical Earth system processes have already been crossed by human perturbations. Recent research indicates that not accounting for the interactions between these processes may further narrow the safe operating space for humanity. Yet existing work accounts only for transgression of single boundaries and only a few studie...

Study region: Selenga River Delta (SRD), Russia. Study focus: How is water occurrence changing in the SRD, and what are the hydroclimatic drivers behind these changes? The presence of water on the surface in river deltas is governed by land use, geomorphology, and the flux of water to and from the Delta. We trained an accurate image classification...

In African small-scale agriculture, sustainable land and water management (SLWM) is key to improving food production while coping with climate change. However, the rate of SLWM adoption remains low, suggesting a gap between generalized SLWM advantages for rural development across the literature, and the existence of context-dependent barriers to it...

Water management by the impoundment of reservoirs has been found to influence evapotranspiration not only locally but also at the basin scale. Highly regulated hydrological basins generally show the effect of a net increase in evapotranspiration accompanying the successive impoundment of reservoirs. However, understanding and isolating the effect f...

At the local scale, artificial impounded reservoirs in dry regions exert influence on the surrounding local climate. Impounded reservoirs have been found to alter precipitation patterns and increase temperature, specific humidity and surface evaporation. The consequences of impoundment or its related climatic changes on the surrounding vegetation a...

Cities are vital for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), but different local strategies to advance on the same SDG may cause different ‘spillovers’ elsewhere. Research efforts that support governance of such spillovers are urgently needed to empower ambitious cities to ‘account globally’ when acting locally on SDG implementation stra...

Nature-based Solutions (NbS), inspired or supported by nature, aim to address societal challenges in a fast-changing environment via an integrated and sustainable approach. Effective implementation of such intervention certainly requires compliance with specific societal configurations in different geographies. Here two cases of NbS to hydrological...

Assessments of ecosystem service and function losses of wetlandscapes (i.e., wetlands and their hydrological catchments) suffer from knowledge gaps regarding impacts of ongoing hydro-climatic change. This study investigates hydro-climatic changes during 1976–2015 in 25 wetlandscapes distributed across the world’s tropical, arid, temperate and cold...

Changes in subsurface water resources might alter the surrounding ground by generating subsidence or uplift, depending on geological and hydrogeological site characteristics. Improved understanding of the relationships between surface water storage and ground deformation is important for design and maintenance of hydraulic facilities and ground sta...

Local SDG action is imperative to reach the 2030 Agenda, but different strategies for progressing on one SDG locally may cause different 'spillovers' on the same and other SDGs beyond local and national borders. We call for research efforts to empower local authorities to 'account globally' when acting locally.

A new probabilistic conceptual model, named Assessment Model of Human Impact on Runoff Based on Stationarity Hypothesis (AMHIRBSH), was developed to attribute runoff variations to human activities through evaluating the changes in the runoff–runoff relationship (i.e. that between runoff in different sub-watersheds). The AMHIRBSH was then applied to...

Paramo ecosystems are tropical alpine grasslands, located above 3000 m.a.s.l. in the Andean mountain range. Their unique vegetation and soil characteristics, in combination with low temperature and abundant precipitation, create the most advantageous conditions for regulating and storing surface and groundwater. However, increasing temperatures and...

The relationship between climate and forest is critical to understanding the influence of future climate change on terrestrial ecosystems. Research on trees at high elevations has uncovered the relationship in the Hengduan Mountains region, a critical biodiversity hotspot area in southwestern China. The relationship for the area at low elevations b...

The efficiency of fertilizer conversion to harvestable products is often low in annual crops such that large amounts of nutrients are lost from fields with negative consequences for the environment. Focusing on nitrogen (N) use efficiency (NUE: the ratio of N in harvested products over the sum of all N inputs), we propose that hydrological controls...

Hydrological connectivity is a critical determinant of wetland functions and health, especially in wetlands that have been heavily fragmented and regulated by human activities. However, investigating hydrological connectivity in these wetlands is challenging due to the costs of high‐resolution and large‐scale monitoring required in order to identif...

The consequent change in land cover from vegetation to water surface after inundation is the most obvious impact attributed to the impoundment of reservoirs and dam construction. However, river regulation also alters the magnitude and variability of water and energy fluxes and local climatic parameters. Studies in Mediterranean, temperate and borea...

Water harvesting has been widely applied in different social-ecological contexts, proving to be a valuable approach to sustainable intensification of agriculture. Global estimates of the potential of water harvesting are generally based on purely biophysical assessments and mostly neglect the socioeconomic dimension of agriculture. This neglect bec...

Geography and associated hydrological, hydroclimate and land use conditions and their changes determine 42 the states and dynamics of wetlands and their ecosystem services. The influences of these controls are not limited to 43 just the local scale of each individual wetland, but extend over larger landscape areas that integrate multiple wetlands 4...

Geography and associated hydrological, hydroclimate and land-use conditions and their changes determine the states and dynamics of wetlands and their ecosystem services. The influences of these controls are not limited to just the local scale of each individual wetland but extend over larger landscape areas that integrate multiple wetlands and thei...

Fresh water—the bloodstream of the biosphere—is at the center of the planetary drama of the Anthropocene. Water fluxes and stores regulate the Earth's climate and are essential for thriving aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, as well as water, food, and energy security. But the water cycle is also being modified by humans at an unprecedented scale...

The planetary boundaries framework proposes quantified guardrails to human modification of global environmental processes that regulate the stability of the planet and has been considered in sustainability science, governance, and corporate management. However, the planetary boundary for human freshwater use has been critiqued as a singular measure...

The planetary boundaries framework defines the “safe operating space for humanity” represented by nine global processes that can destabilize the Earth System if perturbed. The water planetary boundary attempts to provide a global limit to anthropogenic water cycle modifications, but it has been challenging to translate and apply it to the regional...

The authors wish to make the following correction to this paper: The author name “Zahra Kalantary” should be “Zahra Kalantari” [...]

Geography and associated hydrological, hydroclimate and land use conditions and their changes determine 42 the states and dynamics of wetlands and their ecosystem services. The influences of these controls are not limited to 43 just the local scale of each individual wetland, but extend over larger landscape areas that integrate multiple wetlands 4...