research

Hyporheic Zone Processes

The compartmentalisation of catchment management into surface-water, groundwater, and ecological niches means we are not currently well-placed to address the need for integrated and multi-disciplinary catchment management required under the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD). This £157k project (2004-2007) funded by the Environment Agency, is developing a strategic research programme to generate the underpinning science that will allow us to significantly improve our abilities to understand groundwater/surface-water interactions, and to translate this knowledge into robust regulatory policy under the WFD.

The understanding of processes at the interfaces between environmental compartments is particularly important for the WFD, and especially in the groundwater/surface-water interface and associated hyporheic zone. This zone is temporarily dynamic; it will contain effluent groundwater or influent surface water, and may act as a focal point for groundwater discharge from the entire catchment, and may have enhanced chemical and biological reaction properties important to ecosystem health.

The programme of work is led by an Environment Agency research fellow based at the University of Sheffield. The project started in September 2004 and is currently developing a conceptual model of hyporheic zone processes that will help us to identify the gaps in current understanding and predictive models, and to prioritise these for action. This first phase will be used to generate a research programme based on the gap analysis , in order to build a team of researchers working on hyporheic zone processes.

The output will be a prototype model of contaminant attenuation in the hyporheic zone that will be integrated with current and future Environment Agency activities related to the WFD. The project is collaboration with the Universities of Sheffield and Birmingham. It is led by Professor David Lerner, University of Sheffield.