Climate Change and Human Impact on Freshwater Water Resources: Rivers and Lakes, 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

The different patterns of phenomena observed in rivers (water stages, discharges, water temperature and chemistry, ice phenomena, etc.) in an average annual cycle, determined by climate and catchment properties, are relatively stable. Under the influence of changing climatic conditions and increasing human impact, a flow regime might destabilize and turn to another with sometimes quite different seasonal patterns, thus disturbing the established hydroecological conditions and availability of water resources. Depending on the sensitivity of a particular river regime model, its changes are temporarily and spatially diversified. In order to identify a change in any pattern (regardless of the reason), it is first necessary to adequately describe its initial state and the state after the transformation. There are diverse pattern recognition methods, and both supervised and unsupervised approaches can be applied to describe the flow regime patterns.

The hydrological regime of lakes can be analyzed in terms of their thermal conditions, formation of ice, and water levels. The quantitative, physical, and biological transformation of lake ecosystems may result from both natural (changes in precipitation, evaporation, etc.) and human-induced (water intakes and discharges, hydraulic structures) processes. The lake regimes in many regions of the world have been destabilized by intensive land use and the regulation of water relations. Fluctuations in water levels, and thus changes in the lake area and the amount of stored water in the lake, are crucial in many physical–chemical (mixing, dissolution of substances, water transparency, etc.), biological (extent of ecotone zones, extent of photic zone, etc.), and economic (possibility of water withdrawals for industrial, domestic, agricultural purposes, etc.) processes.

The main aim of this Special Issue is to share the results of research on the impact of climate change and human activity on the characteristics of the flow regime of rivers in different regions of the world, mainly in terms of the transformation of the flow regime characteristics, their stability and predictability, and quantitative and qualitative assessments of water resources. Papers focusing on methods of change detection and classifying river regimes are particularly invited.

At the same time, this Special Issue addresses the impact of climate change and human activity on the lake regime characteristics in various regions of the world, mainly in terms of long-term changes in the amount of water resources, seasonal changes in water levels, and thermal and ice conditions.

Prof. Dr. Leszek Sobkowiak
Dr. David Post
Topic Editors