Andreas Hartmann

HS Hydrological Sciences

The 2020 Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scientists is awarded to Andreas Hartmann for outstanding contributions to understanding karst systems, their evolution, and particular hydrological processes, and pushing the community to large scales with new models and a smart use of tracers.

Andreas Hartmann’s research has highlighted the relevance of studying karst systems and their hydrological behaviour. By developing parsimonious mechanistic models using water and tracer fluxes to maximise available information for model identification, Hartmann has contributed to advancing our predictive understanding of karst aquifers and their availability as water resources.

Hartmann’s work has shown how new strategies to model the spatial and temporal variability of karst groundwater recharge, with more constrained parameters, can contribute to overcoming the data scarcity problem in the field, encountered notably when moving beyond experimental sites. He has developed and applied a large-scale karst groundwater recharge model across Europe to demonstrate that future projections of climate change impacts could significantly underestimate (potential) recharge in karst regions if subsurface heterogeneity is insufficiently considered. The societal importance of developing approaches to karst modelling for water resource predictions and projections of future karst water availability is considerable given that it is estimated that karst regions provide drinking water to almost a quarter of the world’s population.

Hartmann has provided key reflections for the hydrological community on the benefits and drawbacks of modelling karst systems in a changing world. His recent work has focused on combining recharge and land use change simulations in large-scale karst regions. It contributes to opening new pathways for further in-depth research on exploring the sensitivities of groundwater recharge in karst regions to precipitation characteristics and land-cover properties. His work also offers opportunities for karst model applications at so far unprecedented scales.

In addition to being passionate about his research, Hartmann has also taken active roles in leading international scientific organisations, including at the EGU and the Karst Commission of the International Association of Hydrogeologists, and communicating karst research beyond the hydrological sciences community.