Depletive Water Balance and High Vulnerability Due to Conflicts over Access and Rights

Sustainable water supply problem becomes strategic when inelastic demand levels are overhauling maximum available supplies. The situation is more acute when the groundwater recharge area is heavily populated, consist of urban, industrial and agricultural areas and above all have typical karstic morphology and extensive regions of thin or null soil cover. During winter season the infiltrated water mixed with the wastewater leaking from poorly designed cesspits and wastewater overflow from the treatment plants of the adjacent settlements. Currently, most of the recharge area is disturbed due to the ongoing urban development in Beitar Elite and Tzur Hadassah in conjunction with the planned Security Fence (apartheid wall) threatens to extend over ~70% of the aquifer recharge area. Such massive destruction in a small watershed leads to considerable decrease in springs discharge and could completely dry-out the springs at the upper part of the valley. The aim of this research is to improve understanding of the hydrologic processes controlling water quantity and quality of springs discharging small (<1E6 m3/yr) basin in the mountain aquifer.We gratefully acknowledge the financial and logistic support provided by Qumran Eco consulting and for SMART project at KIT University which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Special regards to the staff of Soil Hydrology Lab at AQU for their support. Special thanks also go to the reviewers for their efforts for improving and finalizing the outcome manuscript

Assessment of Wind Power Potential at Eastern-Jerusalem, Palestine

Due to the energy demand and lack of supplied energy of Palestinian cities, wind resource assessment is important and necessary. The objective of the work is to analyze the wind speed data characteristics and wind power potential at eastern Jerusalem that are collected at 10 m above ground level from 2008 to 2018. The variations of monthly, seasonal, and annual wind speed are analyzed, and the measured maximum, minimum, and mean values are presented in this study. Wind speed characteristics have been analyzed by the well-known Weibull distribution function, and used to evaluate the wind power of the proposed site. Moreover, the relationship between wind power and mean wind speed is fitted by a second-order polynomial. The shape parameter moderate values showed that wind speed was relatively steady at the site. The highest average maximum value was found to be 5.7 m/s in June-2008, whereas the mean maximum values ranged from 5.4 m/s in June to 3.8 m/s in November. The highest mean power value was found to be 31.66 w/m2 in July with a maximum value of 23.18 w/m2 in 2013. R2 of the polynomial fit provides values of 95% for monthly mean and 96% for annual mean

Effects of climate and atmospheric nitrogen deposition on early to mid-term stage litter decomposition across biomes

International audienceLitter decomposition is a key process for carbon and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems and is mainly controlled by environmental conditions, substrate quantity and quality as well as microbial community abundance and composition. In particular, the effects of climate and atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition on litter decomposition and its temporal dynamics are of significant importance, since their effects might change over the course of the decomposition process. Within the TeaComposition initiative, we incubated Green and Rooibos teas at 524 sites across nine biomes. We assessed how macroclimate and atmospheric inorganic N deposition under current and predicted scenarios (RCP 2.6, RCP 8.5) might affect litter mass loss measured after 3 and 12 months. Our study shows that the early to mid-term mass loss at the global scale was affected predominantly by litter quality (explaining 73% and 62% of the total variance after 3 and 12 months, respectively) followed by climate and N deposition. The effects of climate were not litter-specific and became increasingly significant as decomposition progressed, with MAP explaining 2% and MAT 4% of the variation after 12 months of incubation. The effect of N deposition was litter-specific, and significant only for 12-month decomposition of Rooibos tea at the global scale. However, in the temperate biome where atmospheric N deposition rates are relatively high, the 12-month mass loss of Green and Rooibos teas decreased significantly with increasing N deposition, explaining 9.5% and 1.1% of the variance, respectively. The expected changes in macroclimate and N deposition at the global scale by the end of this century are estimated to increase the 12-month mass loss of easily decomposable litter by 1.1– 3.5% and of the more stable substrates by 3.8–10.6%, relative to current mass loss. In contrast, expected changes in atmospheric N deposition will decrease the mid-term mass loss of high-quality litter by 1.4–2.2% and that of low-quality litter by 0.9–1.5% in the temperate biome. Our results suggest that projected increases in N deposition may have the capacity to dampen the climate-driven increases in litter decomposition depending on the biome and decomposition stage of substrate