R. Berndtsson

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• Professor, Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University
• Professor (Full) at Lund University

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...

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...

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...

(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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The authors wish to make the following corrections to their paper [...]

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...