Lutz Breuer

University of Giessen | JLU

Soil conditions of croplands are a frequent topic of scientific research. In contrast, less is known about large-scale commercial plantations of perennial crops such as oil palm. Oil palm is a globally important tropical commodity crop which contributes to both food and energy security due to its exceptional productivity. However, oil palm crops ar...

The political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal (PESTEL) dimensions in a local community shape the adoption of specific nature-based solutions (NbS). This study provides crucial insights on NbS tailored to smallholder indigenous and peasant communities heavily reliant on water ecosystem services from headwater streams, lake...

The physicochemical conditions observed in streams and rivers result from intricate interactions among various factors, including underlying geology, soil composition, hydro-climatic characteristics (such as rainfall amount and duration), vegetation cover, and human activities. Although streams and rivers exhibit common traits globally, the distinc...

Nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining attention as viable strategies for restoring water-rich ecosystems such as the páramo. However, the lack of evidence on their effectiveness, coupled with a limited understanding of their political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal (PESTEL) context, hinders their widespread adoption....

Evaluating the performance of water indices and quantifying the spatial distribution of water-related ecosystems are important for monitoring surface water resources of our study area since there is a limited study available to compute water indices using high-resolution and multi-temporal sentinel-2 data on a large scale. In addition, a comparativ...

This study assessed the water quality for drinking and irrigation purposes on the southern slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro during the dry season under low flow conditions. Fifty-one samples covering eight different water sources (i.e., stream water from natural and anthropogenic impacted streams, domestic water, spring water, rainfall, groundwater, lake...

Purpose Despite the direct effect of the feeding regime on the environmental impacts of dairy farming systems, its level of intensity, particularly in organic systems, has rarely been investigated. This study compares the environmental impact of a high-input feeding regime with a grassland-based, low-input feeding regime scenario within an organic...

Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) provide a platform for participating countries to share their experiences, failures, and successes in achieving the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The objective of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of the narrative elements, particularly the sentiment, in VNRs in order to more...

Schistosomiasis, a freshwater-borne neglected tropical disease, disproportionately affects impoverished communities mainly in the tropical regions. Transmission involves humans and intermediate host (IH) snails. This manuscript introduces a mathematical model to probe schistosomiasis dynamics and the role of non-host snail competitors and predators...

This study presents a comparative analysis of different neural network models, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) in predicting discharge within ungauged basins in Hesse, Germany. All models were trained on 54 catchments with 28 years of daily meteorological data, either inclu...

This study assessed the quality of water for drinking and irrigation purposes on the southern slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro during the dry season under low flow conditions. Fifty-one samples covering 8 different water types were collected in a snapshot sampling campaign over 10 days in February 2023. First, physical, chemical and biological parameters...

The actual DOI is: https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF002876 The DOI here is from EarthArXiv and links to an additional upload of the same paper. We focus on how different global temperature increases represented in IPCC reports have shifted over time. While the first four assessment reports had a roughly equal focus on temperatures above and below 2°...

Evaluating the performance of water indices and water-related ecosystems is crucial for Ethiopia. This is due to limited information on the availability and distribution of water resources at the country scale, despite its critical role in sustainable water management, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem resilience. The objective of this study...

Schistosomiasis, a prevalent water-borne disease second only to malaria, significantly impacts impoverished rural communities, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa where over 90% of the severely affected population resides. The disease, majorly caused by Schistosoma mansoni and S. haematobium parasites, relies on freshwater snails, specifically Biomphal...

In September 2015, the United Nations (UN) adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to transform our world by 2030. The scientific discourse around these SDGs has expanded rapidly since then, highlighting the need for efficient analysis of the large amount of textual data using Natural Language Processing. Our research addresses this need by...

The topic of riverine microplastics is of great interest to the general public, yet the univocal scientific knowledge on this topic is limited. This review investigated the occurrence of microplastics in 6 major European rivers and their tributaries based on the results from 29 studies. We examined the reviewed studies in regard to data quality and...

Modern civilization relies on a complex, globally interconnected industrial agriculture system to produce food. Its unprecedented yields hinge on external inputs like machinery, fertilizers, and pesticides, rendering it vulnerable to disruptions in production and international trade. Such a disruption could be caused by large-scale damage to the el...

Upscaling chamber measurements of soil greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes from point scale to landscape scale remain challenging due to the high variability in the fluxes in space and time. This study measured GHG fluxes and soil parameters at selected point locations (n=268), thereby implementing a stratified sampling approach on a mixed-land-use landsca...

Schistosomiasis, a neglected tropical disease caused by parasitic worms, poses a major public health challenge in economically disadvantaged regions, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Climate factors, such as temperature and rainfall patterns, play a crucial role in the transmission dynamics of the disease. This study presents a deterministic model...

Perennial biomass crops (PBCs) can potentially contribute to all ten Common Agricultural Policy (2023-27) objectives and up to eleven of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals. This paper discusses interlinked issues that must be considered in the expansion of PBC production: i) available land; ii) yield potential; iii) integration into far...

The dataset contains yearlong monthly measurements (June 2020 to April 2022) of water quality parameters, CO2, CH4 and N2O concentrations from 23 streams, 3 drainage ditches and 2 wastewater effluent sites within within the Loisach, Schwingbach and Neckar catchments in Germany. The study sites covered various upstream land uses (croplands, wetlands...

Anthropogenic activities increase the contributions of inland waters to global greenhouse gas (GHG; CO2, CH4, and N2O) budgets, yet the mechanisms driving these increases are still not well constrained. In this study, we quantified year-long GHG concentrations, fluxes, and water physico-chemical variables from 28 sites contrasted by land use across...

Modern civilization relies on a complex, globally interconnected industrial agriculture system to produce food. Its unprecedented yields hinge on external inputs like machinery, fertilizers, and pesticides, rendering it vulnerable to disruptions in production and international trade. Such a disruption could be caused by large scale damage to the el...

Agroforestry is a land-use system that combines arable and/or livestock management with tree cultivation, which has been shown to provide a wide range of socio-economic and ecological benefits. It is considered a promising strategy for enhancing resilience of agricultural systems that must remain productive despite increasing environmental and soci...

Upscaling chamber measurements of soil greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes from points to landscape scales remain challenging due to high variability of fluxes in space and time. This study measured GHG fluxes and soil parameters at selected point locations (n=268), thereby implementing a stratified sampling approach on a mixed land-use landscape (~5.8 km2...

One of the most deadly neglected tropical diseases known to man is schistosomiasis. Understanding how the disease spreads and evaluating the relevant control strategies are key steps in predicting its spread. We propose a mathematical model to evaluate the potential impact of four strategies: chemotherapy, awareness programs, the mechanical removal...

Evaluating the performance of water indices and mapping the spatial distribution of water-related ecosystems are important for monitoring surface water resources. This is particularly the case for Ethiopia since there is limited information available on water resources development over time despite its relevance for the people and ecosystems. To ad...

High temporal resolution (i.e., sub-daily) stable isotope concentrations of multiple stream and groundwater sources reveal small-scale, rapid transport and mixing processes that are not discernible at coarser resolution. However, long-term, routine sampling of multiple water sources at high temporal resolution is far from widespread. In recent year...

Anthropogenic activities increase the contributions of inland waters to global greenhouse gas (GHG; CO2, CH4, and N2O) budgets, yet the mechanisms driving these increases are still not well constrained. In this study, we quantified year-long GHG concentrations and fluxes, as well as water physico-chemical variables from 23 streams, 3 ditches, and 2...

Demand for sustainably produced biomass is expected to increase with the need to provide renewable commodities, improve resource security, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with COP26 commitments. Studies have demonstrated additional environmental benefits of using perennial biomass crops (PBCs), when produced appropriately, as a feedstoc...

Pakistan's agriculture faces water security challenges owing to insecure water supply and bad governance. The increasing food demand of the growing population and climate change vulnerability are future key threats to water sustainability. In this study, the current and future water demands as well as management strategies are evaluated for two cli...

Anthropogenic activities increase the contributions of inland waters to global greenhouse gas (GHG; CO 2 , CH 4, and N 2 O) budgets, yet the mechanisms driving these increases are still not well constrained. In this study, we quantified year-long GHG concentrations and fluxes, as well as water physico-chemical variables from 23 streams, three ditch...

Accurate quantification of landscape soil greenhouse gas (GHG) exchange from chamber measurements is challenging due to the high spatial‐temporal variability of fluxes, which results in large uncertainties in upscaled regional and global flux estimates. We quantified landscape‐scale (6 km² in central Germany) soil/ecosystem respiration (SR/ER‐CO2),...

For the designation of nitrate vulnerable zones under the EU Nitrate Directive, some German federal states use inverse distance weighting (IDW) as interpolation method. Our study quantifies the accuracy of IDW with respect to the designation of areas with a groundwater nitrate concentration above the threshold of 50 mg NO 3 /l using a dataset of 57...

An adequate strategy for water quality improvement must \nsider a range of political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal (PESTEL) concepts. Nature-based solutions have emerged as promising tools to improve water quality while considering these factors. In this context, fuzzy cognitive maps and the PESTEL approach have been me...

Climate change scenarios predict an increased occurrence of droughts and heatwaves, as well as extreme rainfall events in Central Europe. Alley cropping, which is the inclusion of rows of trees and shrubs in agricultural land, could enhance the resilience of cropping systems, as these systems are expected to positively modify the microclimate and w...

We focus on how different global temperature increases represented in IPCC reports have shifted over time. While the first four assessment reports had a roughly equal focus on temperatures above and below 2°C, the more recent fifth and sixth assessment reports have a considerably stronger focus on warming below 2°C. This is concerning as warming ab...

Schistosomiasis affects over 700 million people globally. 90% of the infected live in sub-Saharan Africa, where the trematode species Schistosoma mansoni and S. haematobium transmitted by intermediate hosts (IH) of the gastropod genera Biomphalaria and Bulinus are the major cause of the human disease burden. Understanding the factors influencing th...

Although global- and catchment-scale hydrological models are often shown to accurately simulate long-term runoff time-series, far less is known about their suitability for capturing hydrological extremes, such as droughts. Here we evaluated simulations of hydrological droughts from nine catchment scale hydrological models (CHMs) and eight global sc...

Die Grundwassernitratbelastung ist seit Jahrzehnten ein bekanntes Problem, doch die Diskussion über Ursachen und Lösungsansätze wird noch immer sehr kontrovers geführt. Zur Wiederherstellung und Erhalt des guten Zustands der Wassersysteme in Europa, wurde die EU-Wasserrahmenrichtlinie implementiert, die unter anderem eine Reduzierung der Nitrateint...

However, knowledge about multiple-stressors effects on urbanised Andean streams is lacking. In southern Ecuador, we assessed how multiple stressors determine the structural (aquatic invertebrate metrics) and functional (organic matter breakdown and delta N of primary consumers) attributes of streams in a densely populated watershed without wastewat...

In simplest terms, agroforestry involves growing trees on farms for a range of socio-economic and ecological benefits. Agroforestry as a land management technique has been practiced for thousands of years. As climate change and environmental impacts of agricultural intensification have become increasingly evident in recent years, agroforestry has g...

Key message • This brief explains the impacts of conversion of indigenous forest to small- and large-scale agriculture on water, carbon and nutrient cycles, and the implications for forest, water and land health. • Our long-term research in the Mau forest of Kenya quantified the negative effect of forest encroachment and poor agricultural practice...

Pakistan’s agriculture is characterized by insecure water supply and poor irrigation practices. We investigate the economic and environmental feasibility of alternative improved irrigation technologies (IIT) by estimating the site-specific irrigation costs, groundwater anomalies, and CO2 emissions. IIT consider different energy sources including so...

Climate change, increasing environmental pollution, continuous loss of biodiversity, and a growing human population with increasing food demand, threaten the functioning of agro-ecosystems and their contribution to people and society. Agroforestry systems promise a number of benefits to enhance nature's contributions to people. There are a wide ran...

The intensification of food production systems has resulted in landscape simplification, with trees and hedges disappearing from agricultural land, principally in industrialized countries. However, more recently, the potential of agroforestry systems and small woody landscape features (SWFs), e.g., hedgerows, woodlots, and scattered groups of trees...

Emissions of reactive nitrogen (N r ) give rise to a wide range of environmental problems. Nitrogen budgets for various systems and on different scales are an established tool to quantify the sources and fate of N r . The national nitrogen budget (NNB) for Germany calculates the nitrogen flows for eight pools: Atmosphere, Energy and Fuels, Material...

Recent advances in laser spectroscopy has made it feasible to measure stable isotopes of water in high temporal resolution (i.e., sub-daily). High-resolution data allow the identification of fine-scale, short-term transport and mixing processes that are not detectable at coarser resolutions. Despite such advantages, operational routine and long-ter...

We compare the probability of different warming rates to their mentions in IPCC reports through text mining. We find that there is a substantial mismatch between likely warming rates and research coverage. 1.5 °C and 2 °C scenarios are substantially overrepresented. More likely higher end warming scenarios of 3 °C and above, despite potential catas...

Detecting the impacts of forest cover changes on hydrology is challenging given uncertainties in how changes will manifest in observed streamflow. Considering changes in the rate of change of observed streamflow (e.g., recession characteristics) may offer insights to hydrological shifts driven by forest cover change that are not seen when consideri...

We compare the probability of different warming rates to their mentions in IPCC reports through text mining. We find that there is a substantial mismatch between likely warming rates and research coverage. 1.5 and 2°C scenarios are substantially overrepresented. More likely higher end warming scenarios of 3°C and above, despite potential catastroph...

Reactive nitrogen (Nr) that is released to the environment has several negative implications for the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biodiversity and human health. A nitrogen (N) footprint is a measure that can help to assess and communicate the impact of personal lifestyle and consumption choices regarding their influences on Nr losses. The N-Calculator...

Catchments are complex systems, which require regular monitoring of hydro-chemical parameters in space and time to provide comprehensive datasets. These are needed to characterize catchment behavior on a local level, make future projections based on models, implement mitigation measures and meet policy targets. However, many developing countries la...

Estimating the maximum event water fraction, at which the event water contribution to streamflow reaches its peak value during a precipitation event, gives insight into runoff generation mechanisms and hydrological response characteristics of a catchment. Stable isotopes of water are ideal tracers for accurate estimation of maximum event water frac...