The WAVE project aims to improve our understanding of the interactions between vegetation, soil and the atmosphere, in order to enable better predictions of some of the consequences of land use and environmental change for both ecosystem services and water resources.

WAVE aims to advance ecohydrological understanding and modelling in three directions,

(a) by improving quantitative representation of physical constraints on the functioning of plants through targeted lab and field experiments;

(b) by developing a community-based model evaluation framework enabling the hydrological community to progressively build on each others’ modelling efforts and rigorously evaluate models against cutting edge observational data; and

(c) by implementing physical constraints and optimality hypotheses in models at different scales and testing them against observations in a consistent and transparent way.

The group consists of 3 PhD candidates, investigating canopy-air exchange, root uptake and plant water transport processes respectively, a postdoctoral fellow focusing on ecohydrological model development and testing, two part-time lab engineers and the project leader. To reach our aims, we combine targeted development of cutting edge technology and experimental setups with laboratory and field observations, and physically-based computational modelling, building strongly on the expertise of our national and international collaborators in Germany, Switzerland, Australia, the US and other countries. In all our activities, we follow an Open Science approach, exploring and developing software solutions to make our research available and reproducible from the generation of raw data to figures and scientific publications.