Dr Willem Vervoort

Summary

Determining future environmental management 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. This is related to stochastic hydrology, surface water groundwater interaction, ecohydrological modeling of vegetation change and risk and uncertainty in hydrology.

Research interests

I am interested in many projects related to water and the environment. Management of the environment can only be based on a thorough understanding of the biophysical processes. I use simplified 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 10 years.

Research supervision

Willem currently supervises and co-supervises 10 postgraduate students, three of which have projects integrating economics and physical modelling.

Recent publications

• Vervoort, R.W. and S.E.A.T.M. van der Zee. Effect of capillary flux on the soil water balance in a stochastic ecohydrological framework. Accepted for publication by Water Resources Research.
• 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. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss. 5, 1159-1189.
• Ancev, T. and R.W. Vervoort. 2007. The National Plan for water security: taking over the role of a market? Agribusiness connections paper 18. http://www.agrifood.info/connections/2007/Ancer_Vervoort.html
• Lee, L.Y.T., Ancev, T. Vervoort, R.W. 2007 Environmental and economic impacts of water scarcity and market reform on the Mooki catchment. The Environmentalist 27(1): 39-49 DOI 10.1007/s10669-007-9011-1
  Vervoort R.W., Minasny, B. and Cattle, S.R. 2006 The hydrology of Vertosols in cotton growing regions II: the development of pedotransfer functions. Australian Journal of Soil Research 44: 479-486
• Vervoort, R.W. and Y. Annen. 2006. Palaeochannels in northern NSW: inversion of electromagnetic induction data to infer hydrologically relevant stratigraphy. Australian Journal of Soil Research 44:35-45
• Vervoort, R.W., S.R. Cattle and B. Minasny. 2003. The hydrology of Vertosols in cotton growing regions I: Hydraulic, structural and fundamental soil properties. Australian Journal of Soil Research 41:1255-1272
• Vervoort, R.W., M. Silburn and M. Kirby. 2003. The near surface water balance of the Northern Murray Darling Basin. Water, Science and Technology 48:207-214
• Vervoort, R.W. and S.R. Cattle. 2003. Linking hydraulic conductivity and tortuosity parameters to pore space geometry and pore-size distribution. Journal of Hydrology 272: 39- 49
• McBratney, A.B., B. Minasny, S.R. Cattle and R.W. Vervoort. 2002. From pedotransfer functions to soil inference systems. Geoderma 109:41-73

Contact

Email:
Website: www.agric.usyd.edu.au/staff/vervoort/home.shtml