Agenda

Daniele Penna, Università di Firenze

Titolo: Stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in hydrology and ecohydrology: new insights from experimental studies at the plot, catchment and global scale

Abstract:
The increasing worldwide concern about water scarcity deriving from global warming stresses the necessity to adopt more sustainable strategies of water consumption for irrigation in agriculture, water supply in forestry, clean drinking water and water for domestic and industrial use. Achieving a more detailed description of processes controlling the amount and availability of water volumes cycling through different compartments of the environment is therefore of paramount importance for an effective management of water resources. Stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen as tracers have proved to be a robust and ubiquitous tool for the quantification of different components of the water cycle and the partitioning of water sources in the soil-plant-lower atmosphere continuum. In this talk, I will present new experimental cases leading to the advancement in understanding the spatio-temporal controls on the transport of water fluxes within and among different compartments of the water cycle. I will report examples of case studies spanning different spatial scales, from plots and catchments in Italy to analyses as the global scale.

Bio Sketch:
Daniele Penna is associate professor at the Department of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Systems of the University of Florence, Italy, where he teaches hydrology-related disciplines. His main research interests focus on catchment and hillslope hydrology, forest and agriculture hydrology, tracer and isotope hydrology, ecohydrology. Particularly, his research aims to get new insights into runoff generation processes in mountain catchments, controls on the spatio-temporal variability of fundamental hydrological variables, origin of water, flow pathways and runoff components at different spatial and temporal scales, ecohydrological processes associated with water transport between soil and vegetation in forested and agricultural sites.