DETECT: Regional Climate Change: The Role of Land Use and Water Management (CRC 1502)

While several continental regions on Earth are getting wetter, others are drying out not only in terms of precipitation but also measured by the increase or decrease in surface water, water stored in the soils, the plant root zone, and in groundwater. Observations, however, do not support a simple dry-gets-dryer and wet-gets-wetter logic and existing climate models fail to explain observed patterns of hydrological change sufficiently. This CRC aims to close this gap in understanding. To better comprehend the origin of these patterns, it is necessary to build a modelling framework that explains past observations as realistically as possible, accounts for potential drivers of change that may have been understudied in the past, and can predict future changes.

The Chair of Crop Science leads together with the Research Center Jülich die Sub-project C02 entitled “Modulation of soil water fluxes by changes in vegetation properties and management.

Sub-project CO2 is investigating the hypothesis that changes in agricultural and forest management (such as grown cultivars / species, species mixtures, cover crops, irrigation, application of fertilizers) during the last decades had strong impacts on land surface-atmosphere interactions and therefore need to be accounted for in land surface models.

Detailed list of partner can be found at