Marco Maneta

- Department of Geosciences

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Current research

My most active current research area, funded by the Montana Space Grant Consortium and the Montana Water Center, is centered around the connections between vegetation and water and energy fluxes at the watershed scale. A research site is being set up in the Bitterroot River Valley south of Missoula. A model prototype connecting a forest growth component to a hydrologic model and an energy balance scheme is under development. The model is intented to evaluate long term impacts of climate change on hydrologic systems at the watershed scale, including potential changes in the structure and composition of the forest and hence in the water and energy demands of vegetation.

Other projects (together with Dr Greg Pasternack at UCDavis) include a simulation of the potential effects that different Climate Change scenarios may have on the water resources in Northern California. Specifically I am looking at how changes in the snow pack in the Sierras and changes in the snow melt timings may affect the water balance at the watershed scale. The research is carried out in the North Fork of the Yuba River.

Past research

My past research has focused on the development and application of hydrologic models at the catchment scale as a method to understand the way water flows in our landscapes. My research has given me the opportunity to work at different international research centers in Spain, the Netherlands and the USA, covering a wide range of hydrologic research. Earlier works with Dr Susanne Schnabel, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Tenchology, incuded the set up of an instrumented watershed in Western Spain to monitor hydrologic processes in connection with land degradation and land use changes.

In the Netherlands (University of Utrecht) in collaboration with Dr. Victor Jetten, mathematical and computational development of hydrologic models was done and the resulting models were used to describe the observed surface and subsurface hydrologic processes in the semi-arid rangeland in Spain. During this modeling effort, automatic model calibration using gradient based and Monte Carlo methods was done and the sensitivity of the model parameters to varying states of the basin and different boundary conditions was explored.

At the University of California, Davis, I worked on interfacing cutting edge hydrologic and economic models to produce a hydroeconomic model able to simulate the effect of water policies or environmental scenarios on farmers net revenues in poor rural areas of Brazil. Fieldwork in Brazil in collaboratin with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Council (EMBRAPA) included the instrumentation of the site to monitor groundwater and surface processes as well as to characterize the site.

Model development work during this stage included methods and tools to bridge the different temporal and spatial resolution at which the economic and hydrologic model operate and to provide the economic optimization algorithm with a mechanism that includes the feedback between water use due to the economic activity (irrigation) and the hydrologic system. This mechanism ensures that the physical constrains given by limited water availability is properly included in the economic optimization problem.

As a by product of the model calibration work done in this project we explored the use of the pilot point methodology used for groundwater systems on the coupled surface-subsurface model used. Also we investigated how information propagates in space from the locations where measurment are done to the location of the parameter to be estimated.