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Associate Professor Willem Vervoort

Summary

Determining future environmental management and profitable agriculture requires understanding of the basic drivers of landscape change. My research focuses on simulating landscape hydrology and forecasting under varying climate in semi-arid landscapes to make agriculture more sustainable. This is related to stochastic hydrology, surface water groundwater interaction, ecohydrological modeling of vegetation change and risk and uncertainty.

Research interests

I am interested in many projects related to water, agriculture and the environment. The goal of our Faculty is to make the agricultural landscape behave exactly like a natural landscape. Development of suitable management to achieve this can only be based on a thorough understanding of the biophysical processes. I use simplified and complex models to understand the key relationships and to support experimental work. Current projects include: including groundwater uptake in stochastic ecohydrological models to predict vegetation distributions, measuring transmission losses from semi-arid rivers, probabilistic forecasting of river flows and floods, rainwater harvesting and river flows in Rajasthan (India), climate change impacts on river flows and identifying surface atmosphere feedbacks.

Background

Willem Vervoort has an undergraduate degree from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and a PhD in soil hydrology from the University of Georgia. He has been working at the University of Sydney for the last 12 years.

Research supervision

Willem currently supervises and co-supervises 11 postgraduate students.

Recent publications

  • Stoof CR, Vervoort RW Iwema J, van den Elsens E, Ferreira AJD and Ritsema CJ (2011) Hydrological response of a small catchment burned by experimental fire. Hydrology and Earth Systems Sciences Discussions 8: 4053–4098.
  • van Ogtrop F, Vervoort R, Heller G, Stasinopoulos D, and Rigby R (2011) Long-range forecasting of intermittent streamflow, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions, 8: 681-713.
  • Cao H, Vervoort RW and Dabney SM (2011) Variation in curve numbers derived from plot runoff data for New South Wales (Australia). Hydrological Processes in press DOI: 10.1002/hyp.8102.
  • Glendenning CJ, Vervoort RW (2011) Hydrological impacts of rainwater harvesting (RWH) in a case study catchment: The Arvari River, Rajasthan, India. Part 2: Catchment-scale impacts. Agricultural Water Management 98: 715-730.
  • Glendenning CJ, Vervoort RW (2010) Hydrological impacts of rainwater harvesting (RWH) in a case study catchment: The Arvari River, Rajasthan, India. Part 1: Field-scale impacts. Agricultural Water Management 98: 331-342.
  • Jones, M.J., R.W. Vervoort and J. Cattle (2009) Nutrient losses under simulated rainfall from pasture plots in the Great Lakes District, NSW. Australian Journal of Soil Research 47: 555-564.
  • Vervoort, R.W., P.J.J.F. Torfs and F.F. van Ogtrop (2009) Irrigation increases moisture recycling and climate feedback. Australian Journal of Water Resources 13(2) 121-134.
  • Vervoort, R.W. and S.E.A.T.M. van der Zee (2009) Stochastic soil water dynamics of phreatophyte vegetation with dimorphic root systems. Water Resources Research 45: W10439.
  • Vervoort, R.W. and S.E.A.T.M. van der Zee. (2008) Effect of capillary flux on the soil water balance in a stochastic ecohydrological framework. Water Resources Research 44: W08245.
  • Plain MB, Minasny B, McBratney AB, Vervoort RW (2008) Spatially explicit seasonal forecasting using fuzzy spatiotemporal clustering of long-term daily rainfall and temperature data. Hydrology and Earth Systems Sciences Discussions 5, 1159-1189.

Contact

Email:
Website: www.sydney.edu.au/agriculture/staff/vervoort/home.shtml