School of Geography: Water Resources and Management
Our research focuses on understanding catchments, their hydromorphological processes, and their policies and governance to explore the impact of climate, environmental and socio-economic change on water resources, and the implications of different management strategies.
Our work spans a diversity of scales (local to global) and environments (e.g. urban, rural, temperate, tropics, arctic), across all continents, responding to current and emerging societal challenges. This includes extreme weather events, flood risk, water scarcity and water pollution. Our research makes significant contributions to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including SDG6 Clean Water and Sanitation, SDG11 Sustainable Cities and Communities, SDG13 Climate Action, SDG14 Life Below Water.
We use a range of approaches to progress fundamental understanding of water resources and ecosystems and explore and manage risks, including modelling, laboratory and field experiments, monitoring, remote sensing, citizen science, governance analysis and stakeholder engagement. Our staff and PhD students play an active role in informing policy and practice through our collaboration with partners from industry, government, the third sector and academia. This includes maintaining the Nottingham University Freshwater Observatory, a real-time hydrological monitoring system in Nottingham City.
Water quality and security
We monitor, measure and model water quality in rivers, estuaries and lakes, including work on emerging pollutants and hazards such as harmful algal blooms. Current projects are investigating water temperature, nutrients, organic compounds, microplastics and heavy metals as modifiers of water quality. We also house one of the few algal pigment laboratories in the UK.
Hydrological modelling and climate change impacts
We use numerical modelling, monitoring and flume experiments to understand hydrological systems, ranging from global to local scales. We have a particular interest in the implications of climate change on hydrological systems, including droughts, river floods and water scarcity.
Managing freshwaters and their ecosystems
We are interested in the interaction between ecological systems and fluvial/limnetic/limnological environmental processes. This includes using ecological communities to monitor changes in water and habitat quality, understanding how organisms perceive, navigate and modify freshwater environments, and investigating the behaviour and distribution of freshwater species in response to environmental change.
Flood risk and resilience
Exploring how blue-green infrastructure and nature-based solutions can reduce flood risk and help cities become resilient to the impacts of climate change is an important strand of our research. We also have expertise in river restoration and working with natural processes to manage flood risk at larger spatial scales.