R. Berndtsson

R. Berndtsson
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R. verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
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R. verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
  • Professor, Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University
  • Professor (Full) at Lund University

FarmWise EU2023 project: https://www.linkedin.com/company/farmwiseproject/?originalSubdomain=se

About

477
Publications
402,233
Reads
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12,356
Citations
Introduction
I am professor in water resources engineering at Lund University, Sweden, and presently coordinate two new EU projects; the FarmWise and the SmartWater4All. I have published extensively on water resources, climate change and pollutant transport. Currently I am the deputy director for the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies and co-coordinator on Strategic Research on Middle East. https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=sv&user=CzF8Z5IAAAAJ
Current institution
Lund University
Current position
  • Professor (Full)
Additional affiliations
January 2010 - present
Lund University
Position
  • Professor (Full)
January 2011 - December 2011
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Position
  • Guest professsor
January 2010 - June 2019
Lund University
Position
  • Professor (Full)

Publications

Publications (477)
Article
Full-text available
Groundwater is the general source of drinking water in the Shimabara Peninsula, Nagasaki, Japan, and consequently, occurring nitrate nitrogen (NO3-N) pollution in the groundwater is a significant problem. Although various countermeasures have been implemented, nitrate nitrogen concentrations remain serious. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate ef...
Article
Full-text available
A novel metaheuristic algorithm called the reptile search algorithm (RSA) was introduced in conjunction with artificial neural fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) for the estimation of standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI). The model was tested in three different climates: arid and super-cold, semi-arid and cold, and semi-arid and m...
Article
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Drought is a climate risk that affects access to safe water, crop development, ecological stability, and food production. Therefore, developing drought prediction methods can lead to better management of surface and groundwater resources. Similarly, machine learning can be used to find improved relationships between nonlinear variables in complex s...
Article
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(1) Background: Water scarcity is a pressing global issue, impacting food security, health, and economic stability in many regions. In Yemen, the challenges related to water resources are particularly acute, exacerbated by climate change, overuse, and a lack of sustainable management strategies. (2) Objective: this paper assesses water resources an...
Article
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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) build on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and aim to promote sustainable global development by addressing poverty, inequality, and environmental sustainability. Among the key objectives of the SDGs, Goal 6 targets universal access to safely managed drinking water and sanitation by 2030, recognizing th...
Article
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A new metaheuristic optimizer combined with artificial neural networks is proposed for streamflow prediction. Hence, the study aimed to forecast monthly streamflow of the main rivers in Urmia, Iran, by considering data shortage and using artificial neural network (ANN) models. By combining three variables: temperature, precipitation, and streamflow...
Article
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The Loess Plateau is one of the most severely affected regions in China by soil erosion, where vegetation restoration is the principal strategy for soil and water conservation. Runoff and sediment reduction benefits (RRB and SRB) are key indicators used to evaluate the effectiveness of vegetation measures. While numerous observational and experimen...
Article
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Achieving sustainable water resource utilization requires a holistic management approach that recognizes the knowledge and values of different stakeholders through a comprehensive participation approach. This study evaluates the indigenous knowledge and technologies employed in watershed management by analyzing qualitative and quantitative data fro...
Article
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Groundwater is becoming increasingly important as surface water is decreasing and becoming more and more polluted. In particular, rural areas in the arid region of Central Asia face problems with both water quantity and quality. In view of this, we investigated the drinking water quality in the Maysky district in the Pavlodar region, Kazakhstan. Th...
Article
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The Brazilian Savanna (Cerrado) is the second‐largest South American biome that corresponds to almost two‐third of the national agricultural production. Extensive agricultural‐driven land‐use changes have significantly altered the landscape, causing increased soil erosion. Furthermore, projections of climate change effects on the Cerrado raise conc...
Article
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Changes in land cover and land use (LULC) are one of the main drivers of erosion and runoff. How ever, most research has relied on short-term observations and only focused on one or two land cover types. We investigated the long-term trade-off between common agricultural land covers (sugarcane, pasture, and soybean), runoff, and soil loss rates. We...
Article
The identification of susceptible dust sources (SDSs) based on the analysis of effective factors (i.e. dust drivers) is considered to be one of the primary and cost-effective solutions to deal with this phenomenon. Accordingly, this study aimed to identify SDSs and delineate their drivers using remote sensing data and machine learning (ML) algorith...
Article
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Climate change and land degradation menace ecosystem sustainability. This study assessed the effectiveness of integrating nature-based solutions (NBSs); soil and water conservation techniques, agroforestry, and reforestation, to mitigate these impacts. Focusing on carbon storage and sediment retention at the watershed level (Sidi Barrak), the InVES...
Article
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Controlling the water level in irrigation channels is important for the efficient management of irrigation and water delivery. In this study, the proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller was implemented in both the HEC-RAS boundary condition, as an internal model, and MATLAB, as an external model. In the latter, the Hydrologic Engineering...
Article
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Groundwater accounting is becoming increasingly important for sustainable societal development. To gain insights into the long-term spatiotemporal changes from 1992 to 2015 regarding groundwater resources in Kumamoto, southern Japan, we analyzed climatological time series, discharge from the groundwater-fed lake (Ezu Lake), and groundwater levels f...
Article
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A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: Climate change studies Entropy-based approach Flood forecasting Network expansion Redundancy Shannon entropy theory A B S T R A C T Study region: Bihar State, located in India's eastern region, displays significant spatial and temporal variation in rainfall during the Indian Summer Monsoon period with subsequent floo...
Article
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The geologically complex Kyzylzharma groundwater field is located in the south-central part of Kazakhstan in the lower Syr Darya Basin. It supplies the 243,000 population of Kyzylorda City by drinking and agricultural water needs. Numerical modeling was used to predict the consequences of increased groundwater withdrawal for future water supply nee...
Article
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Inexpensive and efficient desalination is becoming increasingly important due to dwindling freshwater resources in view of climate change and population increase. Improving desalination techniques of brackish water using graphene-based materials has the possibility to revolutionize freshwater production and treatment. At the same time, graphene mat...
Article
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Keywords: Water crisis northwestern Iran Aquifer depletion Climate change Future water demand and supply Agricultural water use A B S T R A C T The agricultural sector in northwestern Iran uses about 95 % of the region's available water resources and nearly 98 % of are aquifer water. Despite the regionś previous richness in water resources, the sup...
Article
The escalating levels of heavy metals in soil, attributed to diverse sources, pose a pressing concern for human and animal health through their entry into the food chain. This study aimed to evaluate the uptake behavior of Cu, Zn, and Pb in carrots grown in different levels of contaminated soil (control, 30, 60, 90, 120 ppm) and to assess the assoc...
Article
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Infant mortality in Kazakhstan is six times higher compared with the EU. There are several reasons for this, but a partial reason might be that less than 30% of Kazakhstan’s population has access to safe water and sanitation and more than 57% uses polluted groundwater from wells that do not comply with international standards. For example, nitrate...
Article
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Introduction: Runoff measurement and monitoring is a laborious, time-consuming, and costly task. Additionally, common runoff monitoring usually primarily provide water level, requiring information on the stage-discharge relation. Automatic equipment such as flow meter tipping bucket (TB) is a potential option to simplify and provide continuous runo...
Article
Plantation forests (PF) and natural secondary forests (NSF) are the primary reforestation approaches. The establishment of PF can affect forest hydrological processes by changing soil structure. To date, few studies have focused on these changes and the effects on hydrological processes for the paleo-periglacial landform. To reveal reforestation ap...
Article
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Flooding is a natural but unavoidable disaster that occurs over time. Flooding threatens human life, property, and resources and affects regional and national economies. Through frequency ratio and MaxEnt modeling, flood sensitivity was determined in the Amu Darya River Basin in Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan. Slope, plan curvature, distance to r...
Article
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Identifying operational losses in irrigation canals can be difficult due to inaccurate simplification in designing and operating national guidelines. However, this study aims to provide a practical solution to this problem by identifying operational losses, which are the primary cause of off-farm irrigation water losses. The method involves simulat...
Article
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Hydropower is a clean and efficient technology for producing renewable energy. Assessment and forecasting of hydropower production are important for strategic decision-making. This study aimed to use machine learning models, including adap-tive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), gene expression programming, random forest (RF), and least square s...
Article
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Vulnerability maps of groundwater provide an efficient means of identifying environmental trends and prioritizing regions for prevention plans. The GIS-based DRASTIC method, however, does not consider the impact of contamination, so there is a need to modify it according to the specifics of the region and its contamination load. The aim of this stu...
Article
Full-text available
Fluvial floods are commonly studied as an occurrence at the level of a specific basin and are speculated to be closely related to the basin's morphometry. It is possible to identify and rank sub-basins based on how susceptible they are to fluvial flooding events using morphometric criteria. However, one of the key causes that triggers fluvial flood...
Article
Full-text available
Heavy metal (HM)-polluted soil is a serious concern, especially as brackish water is widely used for irrigation purposes in water-scarce countries. In this study, the HYDRUS-2D model was used to simulate HM (copper (Cu), lead (Pb), and zinc (Zn)) transport through agricultural land cultivated with potato crops under surface drip irrigation to explo...
Article
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Semiarid Tunisia is characterized by agricultural production that is delimited by water availability and degraded soil. This situation is exacerbated by human pressure and the negative effects of climate change. To improve the knowledge of long-term (1980 to 2020) drivers for Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) changes, we investigated the semiarid Riha...
Article
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Problems with increasing heavy metal contents in natural waters are becoming a global issue. At the same time, improved methods for water treatment are becoming increasingly important. In this context, natural zeolites can be used to purify polluted water. In this paper, we investigated how the adsorption capacity of natural zeolites can be improve...
Article
Full-text available
Excessive use of water resources in combination with climate change threaten to significantly reduce groundwater in arid and semiarid regions. We studied the effects of climate change on the groundwater level for the important Dehgolan Aquifer in northwestern Iran. The water level in this aquifer has dropped by about 35 m during the last 30 years....
Article
Full-text available
Providing safe drinking water to people in developing countries is an urgent worldwide water problem and a main issue in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. One of the most efficient and cheapest methods to attain these goals is to promote the use of slow sand filters. This review shows that slow sand filters can efficiently provide safe drinking...
Article
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Soil physicochemical properties and macropore spatial structure affect saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks). However, due to regional differences and long measurement time, Ks is tedious to quantify. Therefore, it is of great importance to find simplified but robust methods to predict Ks. One possibility is to use pedo-transfer functions (PTFs). A...
Article
Full-text available
High water consumption in the agricultural sector, population growth, urbanization, and industrialization have gradually turned groundwater into a quantitative and qualitative crisis. This study investigated aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) as the environmental effect of modernization projects in agricultural water distribution systems. For this...
Preprint
Full-text available
Providing safe drinking water to people in developing countries is an urgent world-wide water problem and a main issue in the UN Sustainability Goals. One of the most efficient and cheapest methods to attain these goals is the use of slow sand filters. Slow sand filters can efficiently provide safe drinking water to people living in small rural com...
Article
Full-text available
Peatlands are unique ecosystems that contain massive amounts of carbon. These ecosystems are incredibly vulnerable to human disturbance and climate change. This may cause the peatland carbon sink to shift to a carbon source. A change in the carbon storage of peatlands may result in surface deformation. This research uses the Interferometric Synthet...
Article
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Urban rivers in Asian developing countries are becoming increasingly polluted due to industrialization and lacking treatment of wastewater. We investigated toxicity and likely sources of pollutants for the urban Shitalakshaya River, Bangladesh. Physiochemical variables and heavy metals were examined in water and sediment of an urban river section i...
Article
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Estimating crop evapotranspiration (ETa) is an important requirement for a rational assessment and management of water resources. The various remote sensing products allow the determination of crops’ biophysical variables integrated in the evaluation of ETa by using surface energy balance (SEB) models. This study compares ETa estimated by the simpl...
Article
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Automated soil moisture systems are commonly used in precision agriculture. Using low-cost sensors, the spatial extension can be maximized, but the accuracy might be reduced. In this paper, we address the trade-off between cost and accuracy comparing low-cost and commercial soil moisture sensors. The analysis is based on the capacitive sensor SKU:S...
Article
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Assessing the status of water resources is essential for long-term planning related to water and many other needs of a country. According to climate reports, climate change is on the rise in all parts of the world; however, this phenomenon will have more consequences in arid and semi-arid regions. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of...
Article
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Compact dual-polarization doppler X-band weather radars (X-WRs) have recently gained attention in Scandinavia for sub-km and minute scale rainfall observations. This study develops a method for merging data from two X-WRs in Dalby and Helsingborg, southern Sweden (operated at five and one elevation angle levels, respectively) to improve the accurac...
Article
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Groundwater contamination caused by the use of the aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) was investigated in southern Sweden. ΣPFAS concentrations in groundwater ranged between 20 and 20,000 ng L⁻¹; PFAS composition was primarily represented by PFOS and PFHxS. The PFAS chain length was suggested to h...
Article
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Soil degradation and low productivity are among the major agricultural problems facing farmers of the newly reclaimed agricultural area in the Nile Delta region, Egypt. High content of clay and silt characterizes the soil texture of all farms in the area, while farmers still rely on the traditional mole drainage (MD) system to reduce the salinity o...
Article
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Mixed cropping systems can constitute important agroecological adaptation strategies for enhancing crop growth and productivity in view of climate change, while reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers and providing important ecosystem services. The aim of this study was to investigate growth, competitiveness, and productivity of two forage mixt...
Article
Full-text available
Nitrate pollution in groundwater is a severe problem in Shimabara Peninsula, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. Previous studies have investigated water quality characteristics in the northern part of the peninsula and shown serious effects of nitrate pollution in the groundwater. The present study aimed to investigate the groundwater quality in the south...
Article
Full-text available
Groundwater footprint index (GFI) is an essential indicator to assess the sustainability of groundwater aquifers. Prediction of future GFI can significantly help managers and decision-makers of groundwater supply to better plan for future resilient consumption of surface and groundwater. In this context, artificial intelligence and machine learning...
Article
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Purpose Soil moisture (i.e., the changes in the gravimetric soil water content) redistribution is closely linked with root distribution and preferential flow in soils. This study aimed at exploring the soil water content distribution in the presence of root-enhanced preferential flow in deciduous (Quercus variabilis BI.) and coniferous forests (Pla...
Article
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In recent years, the analysis of abrupt and non-abrupt changes in precipitation has received much attention due to the importance of climate change-related issues (e.g., extreme climate events). In this study, we used a novel segmentation algorithm, DBEST (Detecting Breakpoints and Estimating Segments in Trend), to analyze the greatest changes in p...
Article
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Abstract: In recent years, farmers in Beja, an agricultural governorate in northwestern Tunisia, have expressed their willingness to use urban sewage sludge as agricultural fertilizer, especially with the unavailability of chemical fertilizers and the soil type of the region that is poor in organic matter. However, there is an imbalance between the...
Article
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In recent years, farmers in Beja, an agricultural governorate in northwestern Tunisia, have expressed their willingness to use urban sewage sludge as agricultural fertilizer, especially with the unavailability of chemical fertilizers and the soil type of the region that is poor in organic matter. However, there is an imbalance between the important...
Article
Agriculture faces risks due to increasing stress from climate change, particularly in semi-arid regions. Lack of understanding of crop water requirement (CWR) and irrigation water requirement (IWR) in a changing climate may result in crop failure and socioeconomic problems that can become detrimental to agriculture-based economies in emerging natio...
Article
In dry sandy soil, soil water is naturally redistributed by forces owing to matric and gravitational potential, and temperature gradients. Occurring shrub vegetation strongly influences these patterns by hydraulic redistribution within the soil. This means that plants can move water from moist to drier soil areas to extract nutrients from the drier...
Article
There are urgent needs to evaluate different management techniques to improve groundwater quality. To maintain a good quality of groundwater in the Miyakonojo River Basin (MRB), Japan, the Nitrate Directive Plan (NDP) was implemented in 2004. To assess the efficiency of this plan, we performed multivariate times-series analyses on 26 years (1996-20...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This Swedish research report is published open access by Svenskt Vatten based on the research project "Test av praktisk och teoretisk metodik av X-bandradar teknik - nr 21-106". The report should be cited as follows: Hosseini S. H., Hashemi H., Larsson R., Berndtsson R., Bengtsson A., Bengtsson S., Dahl S., Olsson J., van de Beek R., South N., Pa...
Article
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Due to limited groundwater resources in arid and semi-arid areas, conjunctive use of surface water and groundwater is becoming increasingly important. In view of this, there are needs to improve the methods for conjunctive use of surface and groundwater. Using numerical models, optimization algorithms, and machine learning, we created a new compreh...
Article
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In Streamflow prediction the most important triggering/controlling variables are related to climate, physiography, and landscape patterns. This study investigated the effect of different landscape metrics to relate spatial patterns to surface runoff processes and predict monthly streamflow using climatic and physiographic variables for the 42 sub-b...
Article
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Water scarcity is one of the major challenges in semi-arid and arid areas. Drivers for water scarcity include climate change, population growth, economic, and agricultural development. This paper presents a framework for assessing water scarcity under the impact of climate, industry, and socio-economic changes in the Qazvin Plain, Iran. A system dy...
Chapter
Climate change has directly and indirectly impacted natural and human systems across the globe in recent decades.
Article
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Real-time measurement of soil water content (θ) and pore electrical conductivity (ECp) is essential to improve water irrigation efficiency and agricultural productivity. Low-cost frequency domain reflectometry (FDR) sensors are now representing a powerful tool for irrigation management purposes. However, compared to the time domain reflectometry (T...
Article
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Urban flood damage leads to major costs for private house owners, insurance companies, and water and wastewater utilities. Analysis of flood damage claims can be used to improve the understanding of the details of flood damage characteristics and reasons for drainage system failures. However, few studies have used data of this kind to investigate u...
Article
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Spurred by the degraded forest in the 2022 Chongli Winter Olympic Games area, the Chinese government initiated a national program for mountain forest rehabilitation. We developed a method to assess the quality of mountain forests using an index system composed of stand structure, site conditions, and landscape aesthetics at three criteria levels. T...
Article
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Today, in developing countries, the low surface water distribution efficiency and the lack of supplying water needs of farmers by surface water resources are compensated by excessive aquifer water withdrawal. This mismanagement has caused a sharp drop in the groundwater level in many countries. On the other hand, climate change and drought have int...
Article
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The Pasur River is a vital reservoir of surface water in the Sundarbon area in Bangladesh. Mongla seaport is located on the bank of this river. Many industries and other commercial sectors situated in this port area are discharging waste into the river without proper treatment. For this reason, geospatial analysis and mapping of water pollutant dis...
Article
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Heavy metal (HM) accumulation in soil and plants can occur when water contaminated with HMs is used as a source of irrigation (El-Salam Canal, Egypt). In this study, the effect of watering potato crop in sandy soil from a polluted water source under flood irrigation (FI), sprinkler irrigation (SI), and surface drip irrigation (DI) on the transport...
Article
Full-text available
Urban flood-risk mapping is an important tool for the mitigation of flooding in view of continuing urbanization and climate change. However, many developing countries lack sufficiently detailed data to produce reliable risk maps with existing methods. Thus, improved methods are needed that can help managers and decision makers to combine existing d...
Article
Decision-making processes for clean-up of contaminated sites are often highly complex and inherently uncertain. It depends not only on hydrological and biogeochemical site variability, but also on the associated health, environmental, economic, and social impacts of taking, or not taking, action. These variabilities suggest that a dynamic framework...
Preprint
Full-text available
Urban flood risk mapping is an important tool for the mitigation of flooding in view of human activities and climate change. Many developing countries, however, lack sufficiently detailed data to produce reliable risk maps with existing methods. Thus, improved methods are needed that can improve urban flood risk management in regions with scarce hy...
Article
Full-text available
Groundwater is a crucial source of water supply in drought conditions, and an auxiliary water source in wet seasons. Due to its increasing importance in view of climate change, predicting groundwater level (GWL) needs to be improved to enhance management. We used adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) to predict the GWL of the Urmia aquifer...
Article
Full-text available
In view of climate change, increasing soil salinity is expected worldwide. It is therefore important to improve prediction ability of plant salinity effects. For this purpose, brackish/saline irrigation water from two areas in central and coastal Tunisia was sampled. The water samples were classified as C3 (EC: 2.01–2.24 dS m⁻¹) and C4 (EC: 3.46–7....
Article
Full-text available
Wastewater sludge represents an important resource for reuse in agriculture. However, potentially harmful pathogens are a main threat in this context. Thus, the aim of this study was to examine the presence of helminth ova and protozoan cysts in dried sewage sludge samples collected from ten wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) located in eight gove...

Questions

Question (1)
Question
I have an old research problem that I have often thought of but never been able to answer. It is from a geostatistical study we made a long time ago in an agricultural soil in Tunisia. We found what is often called a "hole" effect for some major soil metals looking at the different scales (~10 cm - 60 m) (see enclosed figure). This means that for specific major soil metals (Al, Ca, Fe, and Mg) the variation increases with decreasing scale (~20 m to 4 m). Thus, there are two peaks in the variograms for scales (4 m and 40 m). I have often asked myself if this is an artifact of the sampling strategy or a real physical fact, and in this case, what the physical explanation would be? I would appreciate any thought on this and possible explanations.

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