Dr. Bano Mehdi-Schulz
Department of Water, Atmosphere and Environment
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU)
I am an ecohydrologist working at the interface of hydrological and agricultural sciences. My research focuses on quantifying the impacts of anthropogenic changes to water quality in river basins.
I lead the research group “Eco-hydrological and Land Use Modelling” at the Institute for Hydrology and Water Management at the BOKU. We are interested in the hydrological processes related to the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum that affect non-point source pollution, and we are interested in determining and quantifying future agricultural land use change.
We work with models as tools, while reporting and quantifying their uncertainty. We develop methods for using ecohydrological models to gain a holistic approach to determining future water quality changes. We answer questions, such as:
- Which cropping systems in Austria are most resilient to prolonged dry conditions?
- How can sustainable intensification be achieved, given land use change and management decisions that farmers make?
- Which hydrological processes affect nitrate transport and how does climate change alter the partitioning of nitrogen losses into the environment?
- How can hydrological models be reliably setup to perform well in ungauged basins?
About me
I received my B.Sc. in Soil Science, an M.Sc. in Agricultural Engineering, and my Ph.D. from the Department of Geography, all from McGill University. In 2009 I received an Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to undertake her Ph.D. research in which I collaborated closely with the Ludwig Maximilian Universität. I investigated the impacts of future climate change on crop production; farmer decision-making factors; the local drivers of land use change; N and P transport by hydrological processes from cropped fields, and water quality threshold exceedances.
- In 2015 I obtained my PhD from McGill University in Prof. Bernhard Lehner's research group.
- In 2019 I obtained an Elise Richter Fellowship from der Wissenschaftsfonds (FWF) in Austria.
- From 2015 - 2021 I was Universitätsassistentin at the Institute of Agronomy, BOKU.
- In 2014 I was a Research Assistant in Transfer to New Technologies at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria.
- From 2002 - 2008 I was a Professional Associate at the Brace Centre for Water Resources Management at McGill University, Canada where I also was the Coordinator of the Water Resources Sector, Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network (C-CIARN).
- From 1998 - 1999 I was a Research Scientist at Resource Efficient Agricultural Production (REAP), Canada.
Eco-hydrology and land use change
Ecohydrology is related to the interplay between climate, soil and vegetation, with temporal and spatial variabilities linked to processes that are at the core of hydrology itself (Rodriguez-Iturbe, 2000). Ecohydrology has been defined as “the study of the functional interrelations between hydrology and biota at the catchment scale” (Zalewski, 2000).
The Eco-hydrological and Land Use Modelling group was set up in 2015. In our group, we apply this definition of ecohydrology to agricultural landscapes and examine the relationship between ecology and hydrology at catchment to field scales with simulation models to gain an understanding of processes and for managing water resources.
Research Projects
I collaborate with natural as well as social scientists and apply field research methods, as well as modelling approaches to my research.
- Selected recent and on-going projects are:
- Agricultural land use change for sustainable intensification (ALUCSI), funded by FWF (2019-2023). In this FWF funded project ALUSCI, I collaborated with Veronika Gaube of SEC to couple the SECLAND model to the ecohydrological model SWAT to determine how best farming practices under future changing conditions can be achieved.
- Sustainable nitrogen management under climate change in Austria (NitroClimAT), funded by ACRP (2018-2022)
- Uncertainty assessment of water flow and nutrient loads under climate change conditions (UnLoadC3), funded by ACRP (2014-2017)
- Assessment of the current and future available water resources under climate change in the Lake Bunyonyi catchment, Uganda, funded by IISD (2018)
Research Team
| PhD Student | Thesis Title | Completion |
|---|---|---|
| Christoph Schürz | Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis of discrete model inputs in ecohydrological modeling | 2020 |
| Elizabeth Odusanya | Multi-site calibration and validation of SWAT with satellite-based evapotranspiration in data sparse catchments | 2022 |
| Cong Wang | Developing a SWAT-submodule to simulate nitrous oxide emissions from typical agricultural catchments in Austria | 2022 |
| Claudine Egger | Coupling an ABM to an ecohydrological model for evaluating land use change impacts on water quality under future conditionsa | on-going |
| Gabriel Stecher | Agricultural management practices, land degradation and implications for water quality in Kenya and Uganda | on-going |
| Christina Formanek | Groundwater quality in Austria | on-going |
| Hope Mwanake | Estimating sediment erosion and water quality in the Sio-Malaba-Malakisi River Basin | on-going |
| Postdoc | ||
| Edberto Lima | Determining sustainable intensification pathways in the Enns catchment | 2023 |
Further links
BOKU Elise Richter Awardees with Rektor Hasenauer