Sally RangecroftUniversity of Exeter | UoE
Sally Rangecroft
PhD, MRes Environmental Sciences, BSc Geography
About
28
Publications
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1,398
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
December 2010 - October 2014
Publications
Publications (28)
![Schematic outline of human drought types (building on [16, 36]): (a)...](publication/359252960/figure/fig2/AS:1141494052335659@1649164798648/Schematic-outline-of-human-drought-types-building-on-16-36-a-100_Q320.jpg)
Human activities both aggravate and alleviate streamflow drought. Here we show that aggravation is dominant in contrasting cases around the world analysed with a consistent methodology. Our 28 cases included different combinations of human-water interactions. We found that water abstraction aggravated all drought characteristics, with increases of...
To explore and address complex water-related issues, true collaborative, interdisciplinary research at the interface of hydrology and social science is necessary. Accordingly, hydrologists are increasingly working with social sciences and becoming involved in fieldwork with participants. With the overarching aim of facilitating collaboration and in...
Water is at the core of many current and future global challenges, which involve hydrological, technical and social processes. Therefore, successful interdisciplinary research on how water-related issues interact with human activities, actions and responses is increasingly important. Qualitative data and diverse perspectives provide much-needed inf...
Droughts have severe direct impacts on the livelihoods of rural populations. Thus, the management of water for communal agriculture and water supply should be well coordinated to enhance drought resilience. Notwithstanding the interrelations among water management institutions in South Africa, there are complexities in the way these institutions wo...
Despite the increasing influence of human activities on water resources in our current Anthropocene era, the impacts of these activities on the duration, rate and timing of the recovery of drought events, known as the drought termination phase, remain unknown. Here, we present the first assessment of how different human activities (i.e. water abstr...
Quantifying the influence of human activities, such as reservoir building, water abstraction, and land use change, on hydrology is crucial for sustainable future water management, especially during drought. Model-based methods are very time-consuming to set up and require a good understanding of human processes and time series of water abstraction,...
Despite the increasing influence of human activities on water resources in our current Anthropocene era, the impacts of these activities on the duration, rate and timing of the recovery of drought events, known as the drought termination phase, remain unknown. Here, we present the first assessment of how different human activities (i.e. water abstr...
In this present era of the Anthropocene, human activities affect hydrology and droughts. Quantifying this human influence improves our understanding and builds fundamental knowledge for water resource management. Analysis of observation data is useful in progressing this knowledge as these human activities and feedbacks are intrinsically included....
The expansion of reservoirs to cope with droughts and water shortages is hotly debated in many places around the world. We argue that there are two counterintuitive dynamics that should be considered in this debate: supply–demand cycles and reservoir effects. Supply–demand cycles describe instances where increasing water supply enables higher water...
Currently most of our understanding about the human influence on droughts at the catchment scale comes from modelling and typically not from observation data. Using observation data, a paired catchment comparison can be used to quantify the different between two similar catchments. Commonly used on control treatment experiments, paired catchments h...
Transformative interdisciplinary methods and tools are required to address crucial water-related challenges facing societies in the current era of the Anthropocene. In a community-based study in the Limpopo basin of South Africa, physical and social science methods were brought together to run interdisciplinary workshops aimed at enhancing prepared...
Drought events cause severe water and food insecurities in many developing countries where resilience to natural hazards and change is low due to a number of reasons (including poverty, social and political inequality, and limited access to information). Furthermore, with climate change and increasing pressures from population and societal change,...
Increasing pressures on water resources in arid regions have led to their increased management and construction of dams; however, the impacts of these anthropogenic activities on hydrological droughts have yet to be incorporated and assessed. Here, the impact of the Santa Juana dam on hydrological drought characteristics downstream has been analyse...
In the current human-modified world, or Anthropocene, the state of water stores and fluxes has become dependent on human as well as natural processes. Water deficits (or droughts) are the result of a complex interaction between meteorological anomalies, land surface processes, and human inflows, outflows, and storage changes. Our current inability...
Water resources in many of the world’s arid mountain ranges are threatened by climate change, and in parts of the South American Andes this is exacerbated by glacier recession and population growth. Alternative sources of water, such as more resilient permafrost features (e.g. rock glaciers), are expected to become increasingly important as current...
In the current human-modified world, or "Anthropocene", the state of water stores and fluxes has become dependent on human as well as natural processes. Water deficits (or droughts) are the result of a complex interaction between meteorological anomalies, land surface processes, and human inflows, outflows and storage changes. Our current inability...
Drought management is inefficient because feedbacks between drought and people are not fully understood. In this human-influenced era, we need to rethink the concept of drought to include the human role in mitigating and enhancing drought.
p>In the current human-modified world, or Anthropocene, the state of water stores and fluxes has become dependent on human as well as natural processes. Water deficits (or droughts) are the result of a complex interaction between meteorological anomalies, land surface processes, and human inflows, outflows, and storage changes. Our current inabilit...
Climate change is affecting glaciers worldwide and the vulnerability and sensitivity of glaciers in the Bolivian Andes mean that they can be seen as a warning ecosystem for mountain regions in other areas. Rock glaciers are protected under rock formations and can play an important role in long-term water storage. They should be factored into water...
El cambio climático está afectando a los glaciares de todo el mundo. La vulnerabilidad y sensibilidad de los glaciares de los Andes bolivianos hace que éstos puedan considerarse un “ecosistema de alerta” para las regiones montañosas de otras zonas. Los glaciares de roca están protegidos por formaciones rocosas y pueden desempeñar un papel fundament...
Water scarcity is a growing issue for high altitude arid countries like Bolivia, where serious water resource concerns exist because of climate change and population growth. In this study we use a recent Bolivian rock glacier inventory (Rangecroft et al., 2014) to estimate the water equivalent storage of these understudied cryospheric reserves. Thi...
Rock glaciers in the arid Bolivian Andes are potentially important water sources, but little is known about their spatial distribution and characteristics. We provide the first rock glacier inventory for the region (15–22°S), based on mapping using remote sensing data in Google Earth, supported by field validation. Of the 94 rock glaciers identifie...
Climate change is projected to have a strongly negative effect on water supplies in the arid mountains of South America, significantly impacting millions of people. As one of the poorest countries in the region, Bolivia is particularly vulnerable to such changes due to its limited capacity to adapt. Water security is threatened further by glacial r...
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the environment originate mainly from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, and pose a significant human health risk. Soils act as environmental sinks for PAHs, as they become strongly absorbed onto soil particles; degradation is mainly driven by microbial catabolism, although it is dependent on PAH bioav...
Projects
Projects (2)
The CreativeDrought project has the aim to build the crossdisciplinary
network and test the innovative methodology that are needed to increase drought resilience of rural communities our pilot case study in rural southern Africa. We engage with local rural communities to experiment with future drought narratives on the basis of co-created model scenarios, which will be embedded in local decision-making and water
management.
Drought severely impacts societies and ecosystems around the world. Traditionally, drought research has focused solely on natural processes underlying drought development, defining climate variability as only driver of drought. Since in many regions rivers are altered and groundwater levels have decreased dramatically due to groundwater abstraction, human influences can no longer be neglected and should be included as additional driver of drought. Due to complex feedbacks between drought and water abstraction, the effects of human influence and climate cannot simply be added; a major scientific challenge lies in finding the relative effect of both. Therefore, the objective of this project is quantifying the relative importance of climatic and human drivers of hydrological drought at the global scale. The project consists of four steps, in which the drivers of drought will be studied in case studies, the relationship of drought with physical and socio-economic factors will be determined and results will be extrapolated to the global scale, via a validation step in data-rich areas. The final outcome is a spatio-temporal assessment of the relative importance of climate-induced vs. human-induced drought visualised in a global map, which will be a transformative step in our scientific understanding of drought and a major contribution to international environmental programmes.
(funded by NWO - Rubicon)
