Further development of water management in the Ruhr region

As a result of inten­sive min­ing, the ter­rain and sur­face in the Ruhr region have in some cas­es sub­sided to such an extent that large depres­sions have been cre­at­ed — the so-called pold­er areas. In these areas, some waters can no longer flow freely. The “deep­ened” areas must there­fore be arti­fi­cial­ly drained on a per­ma­nent basis to pre­vent the water from rivers and lakes from back­ing up. These process­es have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on the over­all water bal­ance in the region.

In a new project, the Post-Min­ing Research Cen­ter (FZN) of the Georg Agri­co­la Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences (THGA) is there­fore now inves­ti­gat­ing how water man­age­ment in the Ruhr region can be made even more sus­tain­able. Above all, farm­ers and the forests in the area could ben­e­fit from this. How­ev­er, tar­get­ed envi­ron­men­tal mon­i­tor­ing should also improve the way extreme events such as heavy rain­fall or long peri­ods of drought are dealt with. This is where the “MuSE” project (Mul­ti­sen­so­ry Earth Obser­va­tion for Sus­tain­able Pold­er Man­age­ment) comes in.

“MuSE” is fund­ed by the RAG Foun­da­tion until 2024. Bär­bel Berg­er­hoff-Wodopia, mem­ber of the board of the RAG Foun­da­tion, empha­sizes: “As the RAG Foun­da­tion, we see it as our respon­si­bil­i­ty to find solu­tions to the chal­lenges that min­ing has left us. With this in mind, we work close­ly with the THGA and the Post-Min­ing Research Cen­ter and sup­port the “MuSE” project with great conviction.”

“Where the ter­rain has sub­sided as a result of coal min­ing, i.e. large ground sub­si­dence has occurred, the soil mois­ture has also changed. This nat­u­ral­ly affects the use of land and resources in agri­cul­ture, forestry and water man­age­ment as a whole. Espe­cial­ly because of cli­mate change, there are far-reach­ing con­se­quences. The Ruhr region needs more water to absorb the con­se­quences of cli­mate change in the long term — even if the impres­sions of the last few weeks actu­al­ly con­vey a dif­fer­ent picture.”

- Prof. Dr. Tobias Rudolph of FZN

This rais­es the ques­tion for Prof. Rudolph and his team of a mod­i­fied man­age­ment of the pold­er water sup­ply — in oth­er words, “What can we do to make bet­ter use of this water? And how can we opti­mize irri­ga­tion sched­ul­ing over­all?” In the new “MuSE” research project, experts at the research cen­ter are inves­ti­gat­ing how such an effi­cient and sus­tain­able reori­en­ta­tion of pold­er man­age­ment could be designed. For exam­ple, high­er ground­wa­ter lev­els and an eco­nom­i­cal and tech­ni­cal use of the ele­vat­ed ground­wa­ter and sur­face water could lead to min­i­miz­ing drought dam­age in agri­cul­ture and forestry. At the same time, tar­get­ed mon­i­tor­ing can help to bet­ter adapt pold­er areas to heavy rain­fall and flooding.

To this end, the experts not only eval­u­ate the avail­able his­tor­i­cal data, but also use mod­ern satel­lite data and con­duct their own mea­sure­ments in select­ed test areas: “We use var­i­ous sen­sors to deter­mine soil mois­ture. At the same time, we eval­u­ate tide gauge data and explore the veg­e­ta­tion with our drones. In the process, we also look at how the health of the plants is doing. We com­bine the on-site infor­ma­tion with remote sens­ing data pro­vid­ed by the Euro­pean satel­lite pro­gram Coper­ni­cus and eval­u­ate it for this ques­tion for the first time,” explains Dr. Xiaox­u­an Yin, a spe­cial­ist in radar inter­fer­om­e­try and remote sens­ing who has joined the cen­ter for the project.

Then it gets extra tricky again: “We fuse the many dif­fer­ent pieces of infor­ma­tion in a so-called 4D mod­el with the fac­tor ‘time’ as a fourth dimen­sion,” the 32-year-old explains. This allows sci­en­tists to track the changes in the water bal­ance over the decades and mod­el them dig­i­tal­ly. “At best, we can make rec­om­men­da­tions for long-term land and resource use and help improve envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions in agri­cul­ture, forestry and water management.”