Das Projekt "ROOT Erosion Dynamics and the Nonlinear Effect of Strenghtening of river alluvial Sediments (ROOTEDNESS) - Alpine environmental Dynamics And the sustainable MAnagement of Non-Traditional water uses (ADAMANT)" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Laboratoire de Recherches en Economie et Management de l'Environnement durchgeführt. ADAMANT is an ambitious professorship program aimed at understanding and modeling, at a coherent level of detail, coupled Alpine environmental processes in the mountain, piedmont and lowland. The hypothesis is that such an understanding will provides fundamental insights to the (non-traditional) use of water in the riparian ecosystem, and therefore explain why and how changes in river hydrology due to water impoundment will affect the riparian biodiversity across space and time scales. These points define the research objectives targeted by ADAMANT: 1. The assessment of the origin and the role of nonlinearities in the routing dynamics of glacierized basins, and related linkages to the probabilistic behaviour of equilibrium snowlines; 2. The experimental definition of (objective) benefit functions for the use of water by the riparian environment in relation to the statistical effects of both floods and moderate flows; 3. The (analytical and numerical) solution to the optimal water allocation problem between traditional and non-traditional water uses under changing scenarios such climatic, economic, operational. The project ADAMANT will accordingly be carried out in 3 interconnected research modules involving 2 Ph.D's and one Postdoc. The work foreseen in ADAMANT will account for field monitoring campaigns and experiments, linear and nonlinear data analysis, and modelling of the above said mountain, piedmont and lowland processes. In particular, the mathematical modelling approach will be of minimalist type whenever a fully physically based (distributed) approach is precluded or not convenient to reproduce statistically significant long-term scenarios. In this manner, overparametrization due to excessive model complexity will be avoided on the one hand, and the model will remain mathematically tractable for the possible search of elegant analytical solutions, on the other hand. ADAMANT research goals are particularly interesting in a time when energy production from hydropower is still among the most used techniques, especially in glacierized basins of alpine countries. From a practical viewpoint ADAMANT will help define new operational rules and guidelines for Environmental Flow Requirements. Overall, this project will provide an integrated and sustainable water management study in impounded alpine riparian ecosystems, and in harmony with present and future countrywide plans of river restoration and renaturalization strategies.