The ERB workshop 2011
"Geochemical, isotope and innovative tracers:
Challenges and perspectives for small catchment research"

For several decades, geochemical tracers and stable isotopes have provided valuable insights on the flowpaths taken by water and the mean residence time of water inside a catchment. These tracers have their individual advantages and complementarities. Nevertheless, over the years, inherent limitations and assumptions of these techniques, such as unrealistic mixing assumptions, unstable end-member solutions and temporally varying input concentrations became apparent and have been largely documented. In order to assess some of these shortcomings, innovative tracers have currently emerged, such as the potential of using living organisms (e.g. diatoms), DNA tracers, fiber optic cables or infrared imagery.

In combination with interdisciplinary approaches, these innovative tracers are to foster a paradigm shift where new process understanding is to generate knowledge of general hydrological behaviour across places and scales. However, there is also the need to better understand the potential and shortcomings of these innovative tracers in generating useful information at the catchment scale, and to make them progressively more routinely available.

The ERB workshop 2011 on geochemical, isotope and innovative tracers will offer a platform where the most recent advances in terms of innovative tracing techniques, analytical methods and new modelling approaches to trace water flowpaths will be debated.

Professor Wojciech Chelmicki, the ERB steering committee member, enthusiastic supporter of hydrological research in small catchments and main organizer of the ERB conference in Krakow passed away on Saturday, 1st October at the age of 58 in Luxembourg. We express our sympathy and the sympathy of the ERB community to his family, friends and co-workers.
We shall all miss him…

Ladislav Holko
ERB international coordinator

© 2011 - CRP-Gabriel Lippmann