Posted 14 October 2020
The CWI team would like to congratulate Professor Andy Baker for his recent feature in the American Water Resources Association’s ‘Water Resources Impact’, September 2020 edition. Professor Baker is based in UNSW’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences (BEES) and has made invaluable contributions to CWI’s research over the years.
Professor Baker’s feature in ‘Water Resources Impact’ is titled ‘Wildfire and Groundwater’ and has been widely circulated among water resource practitioners in the United States and further abroad. In light of the recent catastrophic fires experienced in North America and the beginning of Australia’s own fire season, Professor Baker’s insights are particularly salient and worthy of further consideration. Professor Baker’s feature links to CWI’s expertise in fire in subsurface environments (funded by an ARC Linkage with partners NSW OEH, ANSTO, Optimal Karst Management and the University of Birmingham), and with Pauline Treble (ANSTO), the latest ARC Discovery project which uses this information to obtain records of past fires from cave stalagmites.
The September 2020 edition of Water Resources Impact and Professor Baker’s feature contained within is accessible here.
Image: Underneath the fire: monitoring the impact of fire in cave percolation waters.
Professor Andy Baker features in American Water Resources Association ‘Water Resources Impact’, September 2020 edition.
The Connected Waters Initiative (CWI) is pleased to welcome Taylor Coyne to its network as a postgraduate researcher. If you’re engaged in research at a postgraduate level, and you’re interested in joining the CWI network, get in touch! The CWI network includes multidisciplinary researchers across the Schools of Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Languages and Law.
The Grand Challenge on Rapid Urbanisation will establish Think Deep Australia, led by Dr Marilu Melo Zurita, to explore how we can use our urban underground spaces for community benefit.
On the 21 August 2020, CWI researchers made a submission to the National Water Reform Inquiry, identifying priority areas and making a number of recommendations as to how to achieve a sustainable groundwater future for Australia.
Results published from a research project between the Land Development Department (LDD) Thailand and UNSW has demonstrated how 2-dimensional mapping can be used to understand soil salinity adjacent to a earthen canal in north east Thailand (Khongnawang et al. 2020).
