MEDSAL

Adapted from the project website

Project Aim

MEDSAL Project aims to secure availability and quality of groundwater reserves in Mediterranean coastal areas, which are one of the most vulnerable regions in the world in terms of water scarcity and quality degradation. This objective will be addressed by providing a novel holistic approach directed towards sustainable management of coastal aquifers are affected by increased salinization risk. The proposed framework is envisaged to integrate different tools, techniques and methods – such as environmental isotopes, hydrogeological and hydrogeochemical modelling, advanced geostatistics and deep learning techniques – into an innovative assessment and management approach to: a) identify salinization sources (single or multiple) and decipher their governing processes, b) assess potential interactions with other compartments (small scale) and with other systems at basin (large) scale, c) forecast the spatiotemporal evolution of primary salinization and secondary impacts, d) perform risk assessment under variable climatic projections, and e) develop a public web-GIS observatory to support monitoring, management and decision making.

Goals

MEDSAL aims at developing innovative methods to identify various sources and processes of salinization and at providing an integrated set of modeling tools that capture the dynamics and risks of salinization. In this context, MEDSAL will provide a classification of groundwater salinization types for Mediterranean coasts and innovative methods to detect these types, also in complex karstic and data-scarce environments. These outcomes will be reached by better integration of hydrogeochemical and environmental isotope data with physical-based groundwater flow and transport models and advanced geostatistics. Artificial intelligence and deep learning methods will be also used to improve the detection of patterns in multi-dimensional hydrogeochemical and isotope data.

Duration

September 2019 - February 2023