Georgia Destouni

Stockholm University | SU

Water on land is essential for all societal, ecosystem, and planetary health aspects and conditions, and all life as we know it. Many disciplines consider and model similar terrestrial water phenomena and processes, but comparisons and consistent validations are lacking for the datasets used by various science communities for different world parts,...

Undertaking systemic risk assessments of critical infrastructures (CIs) is necessary to improve understanding, mitigate impacts, and increase resilience to cascading effects of intensifying hydrometeorological hazards. This paper presents a novel quantitative approach for simulating local physical interdependencies between multiple infrastructure s...

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...

Heatwaves can greatly impact societies, underscoring the need to extend current heatwave prediction lead times. This study investigated multiple machine-learning (ML) model approaches for heatwave occurrence prediction with long lead times of one to five months based on explanatory atmospheric and land surface features. Five ML classifiers were bui...

Soil sustains life and provides ecosystem services relevant for the environment, society, and the economy. However, soil is a finite resource and is vulnerable to degradation that reduces its ability to provide goods and services. The Mediterranean region is the area most susceptible to soil degradation and desertification within Europe, with ongoi...

The Mediterranean region is characterized by specific climatic (dry and hot summers and mild winters), geologic (especially karstic formations) and topographic gradients that make it diverse in terms of socio-economic and environmental features, but also unique. It has been considered a biodiversity hotspot but also a climate change hotspot, with t...

Coastal regions host a large portion of the global population and face complex balancing challenges for achieving economic, social, and environmental sustainability. This chapter presents an innovative participatory approach to meeting these challenges, developed in the EU Horizon 2020 project “The collaborative land-sea integration platform” (COAS...

Status quo water scarcity in the Mediterranean region is expected to be exacerbated as hydro-climatic changes intensify, demanding the development of place-based interventions with careful attention to contextualized economic, environmental, social, and institutional interactions. Key to this will be advancement of contemporary understanding of the...

Terrestrial ecosystem respiration increases exponentially with temperature, constituting a positive feedback loop accelerating global warming. However, the response of ecosystem respiration to temperature strongly depends on water availability, yet where and when the water effects are important, is presently poorly constrained, introducing uncertai...

In this paper we present a framework to aid in the selection of optimal environmental indicators for detecting and mapping extreme events and analyzing trends in heatwaves, meteorological and hydrological droughts, floods, and their compound occurrence. The framework uses temperature, precipitation, river discharge, and derived climate indices to c...

Hydrology plays a crucial role in understanding Earth's intricate water system and addressing water‐related problems, including against the backdrop of ongoing climate change. A retrospective review of the evolution of hydrology up to the current state of research is of great importance for understanding this role. While there have been some quanti...

To address the increasing need for hydroclimatic hazard assessment, a framework to map hotspots and analyze trends in heat waves, droughts, floods, and their compound occurrences was developed. The framework uses temperature, precipitation, river discharge, and derived climate indices to characterize the spatial distribution of hazard intensity, fr...

A new special collection welcomes translational research contributions that bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and practical applications regarding water as a key societal resource or a risk.

The out‐of‐sight groundwater and visible but much less extensive surface waters on land constitute a linked terrestrial water system around the planet. Research is crucial for our understanding of these terrestrial water system links and interactions with other geosystems and key challenges of Earth System change. This study uses a scoping review a...

Translational research (TR) represents a promising systematic process for going from scientific discoveries to practical applications. Through conversations with academics, practitioners, decision‐makers and users, there has emerged a broad level of water science community support for including TR in Water Resources Research (WRR) publications. Bas...

Flooding is one of the most serious and frequent natural hazards affecting human life, property, and the environment. This study develops and tests a deep learning approach for large‐scale spatial flood modeling, using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and optimized versions combined with the Gray Wolf Optimizer (GWO) or the Imperialist Competitiv...

The emergence of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has garnered significant attention, particularly in academic and scientific circles. Researchers, scientists, and instructors hold varying perspectives on the advantages and disadvantages of using ChatGPT for research and teaching purposes. This commentary offers a brief explanation of...

Drought's intensity and duration have increased in many regions over the last decades. However, the propagation of drought‐induced water deficits through the terrestrial water cycle is not fully understood at a global scale. Here we study responses of monthly evaporation (ET) and runoff to soil moisture droughts occurring between 2001 and 2015 usin...

Agricultural drought can severely reduce crop yields, lead to large economic losses and health impacts. Combined climate and land use variations determine key indicators of agricultural drought, including soil moisture and the Palmer drought severity index (PDSI). This study investigated the use of machine learning (ML) methods for predicting these...

Legacy pollutants are increasingly proposed as possible reasons for widespread failures to improve water quality, despite the implementation of stricter regulations and mitigation measures. This study investigates this possibility, using multi-catchment data and relatively simple, yet mechanistically-based, source distinction relationships between...

Population growth is increasing the pressure on water resource availability. For useful assessment and planning for societal water availability impacts, it is imperative to disentangle the direct influences of human activities in the landscape from external climate‐driven influences on water flows and their variation and change. In this study we us...

Study region Six wetland sites around Iran (Gavkhoni and Hur al-Azim wetlands, Gorgan Bay, and Namak, Urmia, and Maharloo & Bakhtegan lakes) and their associated hydrological basins. Study focus The aim was to distinguish the contributions of climatic and non-climatic changes (including land-use/land-cover, LULC) to areal decline in six Iranian we...

On‐going climatic changes and land‐use changes may impact water storage dynamics within wetlandscapes (defined as the entire hydrological catchments of interconnected wetland systems). These dynamics are closely linked to many wetland ecosystem services including flood buffering, nutrient retention and biodiversity support. Here we investigate if a...

Coastal eutrophication is a major issue worldwide, also affecting the Baltic Sea and its coastal waters. Effective management responses to coastal eutrophication require good understanding of the interacting coastal pressures from land, the open sea, and the atmosphere, and associated coastal ecosystem impacts. In this study, we investigate how res...

On behalf of the editorial board of Water Resources Research (WRR) and the entire water science community, we want to express our most heartfelt gratitude to all who reviewed manuscripts for the journal in 2021. Your great efforts have ensured and improved the high quality and impact of the WRR papers and generally of research in our field. In 2021...

Increasing incidences of eutrophication and groundwater quality impairment from agricultural nitrogen pollution are threatening humans and ecosystem health. Minimal improvements in water quality have been achieved despite billions of dollars invested in conservation measures worldwide. Such apparent failures can be attributed in part to legacy nitr...

Urban growth alters environmental conditions with major consequences for climate regulation and the exposure of population to heat. Nature-based solutions may be used to alleviate the increasing urban climate pressures, but the climate regulation services that these solutions can supply for and across different urban conditions remains understudied...

To reach the global aspiration of 17 ambitious SDGs, local realities must be integrated. Often, models are developed based on quantitative statistical data sources from databases on environmental indicators or economics to assess how a given SDG can be achieved. This process however removes the local realities from the equation. How can you best in...

Recognition of climate-sensitive infectious diseases is crucial for mitigating health threats from climate change. Recent studies have reasoned about potential climate sensitivity of diseases in the Northern/Arctic Region, where climate change is particularly pronounced. By linking disease and climate data for this region, we here comprehensively q...

Large-scale covariations of freshwater fluxes and storages on land can critically regulate the balance of green (evapotranspiration) and blue (runoff) water fluxes, and related land-atmosphere interactions and hydroclimatic hazards. Such large-scale covariation patterns are not evident from smaller-scale hydrological studies that have been most com...

Soil, a non-renewable resource, sustains life on Earth by supporting around 95% of global food production and providing ecosystem services such as biomass production, filtration of contaminants and transfer of mass and energy between spheres. Unsustainable management practices and climate change are threatening the natural capital of soils, particu...

Changes in climate, land use, and land management impact the occurrence and severity of wildland fires in many parts of the world. This is particularly evident in Europe, where ongoing changes in land use have strongly modified fire patterns over the last decades. Although satellite data by the European Forest Fire Information System provide large-...

Hydrochemical constituents in streams may originate from currently active sources at the surface and/or legacy sources from earlier surface inputs, waste deposits and land contamination. Distinction and quantification of these source contributions are needed for improved interpretation of tracer data and effective reduction of waterborne environmen...

Distinction between active and legacy sources of nutrients is needed for effective reduction of waterborne nutrient loads and associated eutrophication. This study quantifies main typological differences in nutrient load behavior versus water discharge for active and legacy sources. This quantitative typology is used for source attribution based on...

Wetlands provide multiple ecosystem services of local and global importance, but currently there exists no comprehensive, high‐quality wetland map for the Arctic region. Improved information about Arctic wetland extents and their vulnerability to climate change is essential for adaptation and mitigation efforts, including for indigenous people depe...

Warming and hydrological changes have already affected and shifted environments in the Arctic. Arctic wetlands are complex systems of coupled hydrological, ecological, and permafrost‐related processes, vulnerable to such environmental changes. This review uses a systems perspective approach to synthesize and elucidate the various interlinked respon...

Understanding interactions between complex human and natural systems involved in urban carbon cycling is important when balancing the dual goals of urban development to accommodate a growing population, while also achieving urban carbon neutrality. This study develops a systems breakdown accounting method to assess the urban carbon cycle. The metho...

Key Points The editors thank the 2020 peer reviewers

Coastal eutrophication is a major environmental issue worldwide. In the Baltic Sea, eutrophication affects both the coastal waters and the open sea. Various policy frameworks aim to hinder its progress but eutrophication-relevant water quality variables, such as chlorophyll-a concentrations, still exhibit opposite temporal trends in various Baltic...

Are academic, newspaper and regulatory documents aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SENDAI)? To answer this question, we develop a framework to compare the most commonly occurring keywords across these document types, as well as their use of Sustainable Development Goa...

Coastal eutrophication is a common problem worldwide, with main drivers including land-based freshwater and nutrient discharges, as well as hydroclimatic and open sea conditions. This study investigates the combined effects of different hydroclimatic and eutrophication management scenarios on coastal water quality and ecological status. As a case s...

Hydroclimatic change may affect the range of some infectious diseases, including tularemia. Previous studies have investigated associations between tularemia incidence and climate variables, with some also establishing quantitative statistical disease models based on historical data, but studies considering future climate projections are scarce. Th...

Coastal wetlands and lagoons are under pressure due to competing demands for freshwater resources and climatic changes, which may increase salinity and cause a loss of ecological functions. These pressures are particularly high in Mediterranean regions with high evaporative demand compared to precipitation. To manage such wetlands and maximize thei...

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...

Spatial and temporal characteristics of surface water resources (e.g., extension, connectivity, seasonality) are key elements in water allocation, climate and hydrological regulation, ecosystem functioning, and the food-energy-water nexus. Changes in surface water area due to losses/gains to land could strongly affect these processes on different s...

Soil moisture droughts have comprehensive implications for terrestrial ecosystems. Here we study time-accumulated impacts of the strongest observed droughts on vegetation. The results show that drought duration, the time during which surface soil moisture is below seasonal average, is a key diagnostic variable for predicting drought-integrated chan...

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...

Comprehensive assessment of hydro-climatic variations and change trends is essential for understanding, mitigating, and adapting to key water resource changes in different parts of the world. We performed such an assessment on Iran, as representative of an arid/semi-arid and geopolitically important world region. We acquired and calculated data tim...

Population increases and environmental degradation are challenges for urban sustainability. Planning support systems are available to assist local authorities in developing strategies toward sustainability and resilience of urban areas, but are not always used in practice. We adapted an open-source planning support system to the case of Stockholm C...

Soil moisture is an important variable for land-climate and hydrological interactions. To investigate emergent large-scale, long-term interactions between soil moisture and other key hydro-climatic variables (precipitation, actual evapotranspiration, runoff, temperature), we analyze monthly values and anomalies of these variables in 1378 hydrologic...

Plain Language Summary The surface water resources over the world's continental area are critical for water security, ecosystem functioning, hydroclimatic regulation, and related societal functions. To resolve contrasting reports on how global surface water area has changed over the last decades, we have reanalyzed the underlying data from satellit...

Freshwater ecosystems provide irreplaceable services for both nature and society. The quality and quantity of freshwater affect biogeochemical processes and ecological dynamics that determine biodiversity, ecosystem productivity, and human health and welfare at local, regional and global scales. Freshwater ecosystems and their associated riparian h...

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...

Abstract Rapid changes in high‐latitude hydroclimate have important implications for human societies and environment. Previous studies of different regions have indicated better agreement between climate model results and observation data for the thermodynamic variable of surface air temperature (T) than for the water variables of precipitation (P)...

Human-induced urban growth and sprawl have implications for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that may not be included in conventional GHG accounting methods. Improved understanding of this issue requires use of interactive, spatial-explicit social–ecological systems modeling. This paper develops a comprehensive approach to modeling GHG emissions from...