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which in turn will provide tremendous guidance for anti-

desertification and land reclamation initiatives.

Ecohydrology

In 2010, Dr Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe of Princeton University

and Dr Andrea Rinaldo of the École Polytechnique Fédérale

de Lausan in Switzerland won the Creativity Prize for their

invention and development of the new field of ecohydrology

which bridges the gap between the physical and life sciences.

Ecohydrology is a multidisciplinary research field borrowing

from a number of ‘classic’ disciplines (physical sciences, life

sciences) yet aiming at a unified picture of water-supported

biological dispersion. In practical terms, the new research field

presents itself as a comprehensive blend of theory (mathemat-

ical modelling), interpretation of past and present biological

records, and field experimentation. Ecohydrology is a power-

ful tool in combating desertification, since human activities

alter the linkages between climate, ecosystem functioning and

water availability in arid lands. Dryland ecohydrology directly

tackles the crucial question: do human beings cause deserts?

Managing human water needs in the desert

In 2008, Dr Patricia Gober won the Water Management and

Protection Prize as co-director of the Decision Center for a

Desert City (DCDC) at Arizona State University, for work at

the forefront of integrating physical and social science into a

decision support system for enhanced water planning in an

urban, desert region, with proven results. DCDC successfully

engages with the daunting challenge of managing water in the

face of climate change by introducing a new kind of scientific

enterprise —one that includes social and policy scientists along

with climate scientists, hydrologists and engineers; one that

embodies a holistic, system-wide perspective and considers the

dynamic interactions between energy and water use; one that

facilitates collaboration between decision makers and scientists,

and one that is firmly focused on the future. As a ‘decision

centre’ the organization asks the ‘what if’ questions, it explores

the kinds of decisions that must be made today to avoid future

disasters, and it provides strategies that are robust enough to

work over a wide range of future climate conditions.

Water resources management in arid areas

Dr Howard S. Wheater of Imperial College, London, won

the Water Management and Protection Prize in 2006 for his

work in improving our understanding of the hydrology of arid

areas, developing suitable modelling tools for the management

of those areas, applying them in practice and disseminating

state-of-the-art information to students and practitioners. He

carried out some of his winning work as a co-chair of the

UNESCO initiative, G-WADI (Global network for Water and

Development Information in arid lands), a network which

promotes international and regional cooperation in the arid

and semi-arid areas.

Other PSIPW initiatives

Besides awarding its suite of prizes every two years, PSIPW

is active in numerous water-related projects, some of which

focus on combating desertification, community development

and sustainable agriculture through the restoration and reha-

bilitation of degraded land. One of these initiatives is the

Prince Sultan Project for the Rehabilitation of Villages and

Hamlets in Saudi Arabia, which engages in rainwater harvest-

ing and groundwater recharge to provide sufficient water for

sustainable agriculture in the country’s rural areas. PSIPW

also supports a research chair at King Saud University with a

focus on rainwater and run-off water harvesting and storage.

PSIPW Sixth Award winners

The Sixth Award ceremony for the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz

International Prize for Water was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on 15

December 2014. The winners were:

Creativity Prize: the GPS Reflections Group led by Dr Kristine M.

Larson (University of Colorado, Boulder)

for discovering how GPS

instruments, which exist all over the world, can be used to provide

critical information to hydrologists, like soil moisture, snow depth

and vegetation water content, at minimal cost.

Creativity Prize: Dr Eric F. Wood and Dr Justin Sheffield

(Princeton University)

for developing a state-of-the-art system

for accurately monitoring, modelling and forecasting drought on

regional, continental and global scales, which is used for drought

prediction throughout the world.

Surface Water Prize: Dr Larry Mays (Arizona State University)

for

demonstrating how ancient water technologies can be adapted to

address the urgent needs of people living in water-scarce regions today.

Groundwater Prize: Dr Jesús Carrera Ramirez (Institute for

Environmental Assessment and Water Research, CSIC, Barcelona,

Spain)

for contributing decisively to the development of mathematical

hydrogeology and transport modelling in groundwater systems.

Alternative Water Resources Prize: Dr Polycarpos Falaras

(National Center for Scientific Research ‘Demokritos’, Athens,

Greece)

, coordinator of the European Union’s CLEANWATER Project,

for developing a novel detoxification system that destroys toxins

through solar photocatalysis during the water filtration process.

Water Management and Protection Prize: Dr WilliamW-G Yeh

(University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

for pioneering the

development of optimization models to plan, manage and operate

large-scale water resources systems throughout the world. His

methodology, and the algorithms he developed for the real-time

operation of complex, multiple-purpose, multiple-reservoir systems,

have been adopted in a large number of countries including the United

States, Brazil, Korea, Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China.

Winners of the PSIPW Sixth Award. Top: Kristine Larson, Eric Wood

and Justin Sheffield, and Larry Mays. Bottom: Jesús Carrera Ramirez,

Polycarpos Falaras and William Yeh

Image: PSIPW

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