Professorship for Water and Soil Resource Research

The working group is dedicated to a holistic view upon interactions between land use, land management, water and soil resources. Therefore, interdisciplinary research at the intersection between hydrology, soil science, geomorphology, agronomy and biogeochemistry is essential, and is the focus of the working group members.

Special interests within the working group are:

1. Surface runoff and soil redistribution as affected by landscape patchiness and connectivity.
2. Sediment-burden carbon redistribution and its effects upon terrestrial and aquatic carbon balance.
3. Pathways of carbon from plants and microorganisms into specific carbon fractions in climatically and geochemically different soils.
4. Sustainable management of water and  soil resources.

We use and refine a wide range of conceptual and physically oriented models to analyse different aspects of water, sediment and  carbon fluxes on various spatial and temporal scales. Moreover, field as well as laboratory measurements are carried out to improve process understanding, which range from sediment and carbon analyses to continuous monitoring in small catchments.

Apart from research in Central Europe, the working group is active in the tropical South of India. Recently, a new and challenging working region – the Democratic Republic of Kongo – was added through a DFG-Emmy-Noether Group managed by Dr. Sebastian Doetterl.

The research group is part of the faculty of Applied Informatics of University Augsburg and is also involved into the activities of the Environmental Science Centre (WZU).