The development and intensification of agricultural production has led to excessive large-scale and long-term transfers of pollutants to water bodies across the globe. During the past few decades, we have consequently witnessed the degradation of the quality of groundwater, surface water and estuaries, which threaten exposed humans and ecosystems. Yet, despite billions invested in conservation efforts, only minimal enhancements in water quality have been observed. Indeed, diffuse contaminations present specific challenges in their understanding, monitoring and modeling, which may prevent effective management and regulations. These specific challenges are posed by factors such as an insufficiency of available data, a complex targeted monitoring, a demanding model resolution and parametrization, and the emergence of puzzling phenomena such as legacy effects. To design adapted regulations, there is then an urgent need to, among other, improve the understanding and conceptualization of regional scale water bodies contamination, better strategizing monitoring, and develop accurate and efficient transport models at relevant spatial and temporal scales.
Broadly, this session seeks contributions that moves forward our protection against diffuse contaminations. Focus will specially be on recent advances on the conceptualization, processes understanding and modeling of contaminant transfer from the land through the hydro(geo)logical system. We highly welcome presentations that work towards innovative representation of reactivity at relevant scales, local scale data integration into large scale models, upscaling schemes, and integrated modeling frameworks. This session also encourages discussion on new advances, methods, and approaches for quantifying contamination dynamics in regional hydro(geo)logical systems in diverse climatic and hydrologic settings.