High-resolution modelling and monitoring of water and energy transfers in wetland ecosystems (HiWET)

Despite the protected status of many freshwater wetlands, many of these ecosystems are under threat of (further) degradation due to climate change and anthropogenic activities. As processes in wetland ecosystems are highly dynamic and complex and wetlands are often difficult to access, hampering their large-scale monitoring in the near real time, still major knowledge gaps exits.

The main research objectives are:

Overcome limitations of water and energy balance modeling and reduce uncertainty by integration into a single multi-model approach;
Obtain consistent ET estimates across scales (multi-scale);
Enable consistent thermal/ET monitoring at high spatial and temporal resolution;
Gain understanding on relation ET and vegetation/ecosystem functioning in temperate wetlands;
Combine field and RS based approaches to provide wetland ecosystem health indicators.