Description du poste

A 24 month post-doctoral position is opened at the UCL within the framework of the EU-FP6-STREP project entitled : ALERT : Sustainable management of water resources by automated real time monitoring. The project aims to develop a radically different monitoring strategy for assessing the impact of climatic change on water resources, land/soil degradation, contaminant transport and hydrogeological hazards. The ALERT survey concept will allow the near real-time measurement of geophysical, hydrochemical and hydrogeological properties, virtually "on demand", thereby giving early warning of potential threats to ecosystems, soil functioning and vulnerable water systems. The project will focus primarily on coastal zones in Mediterranean countries (Spain, Morocco, Tunis) where aquifers and soils are under threat from over-exploitation, rising sea levels, anthropogenic pollutants and climatic change. The monitoring data will be integrated with physical (hydrogeological , hydrological, land use, climate) and socio-economic models in order to asses the sustainability of alternative management strategies. Monitoring and modelling data will therefore be implemented within an operational water management decision support system using advanced data fusion techniques.

The post-doctoral researcher will be integrated within a EU project consortium encompassing specialists in the area of geophysics, hydrology, hydrogeology, water resources management, and information technology, belonging to 11 major European and North African research institutes. He will have major responsibilities in designing the decision support system, thereby implementing scenario analysis, risk analysis and cost benefit analysis in an operational tool. His tasks will encompass i) the characterisation of the decisions making context for the different case studies adopting thereby a participatory stake-holder approach ; ii) the design of a novel impact indicator method for assessing the impact of alternative management strategies on the water resources based on the ALERT survey concept; iii) the prototyping of a decision support system and testing for the identified case studies; and iv) the realisation of a preliminary cost benefit analysis allowing to evaluate the technical, physical and socio-economic feasibility and sustainabiliy for the ALERT survey and data analysis concept. At the UCL, the post-doctoral researcher will closely collaborate with a Ph D student working in the same project and the working group leader.