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Natural flood management (NFM) involves the use of natural processes and environments to mitigate flood risk. Large tracts of upland areas in Wales are used for commercial forestry, and appropriate management of the forest structure, species and age diversity, and harvesting schedules in these areas has the potential to provide significant NFM benefits, which have not yet been fully explored. In this study, we sought to develop a digital twin of the forests in the Afon Pennal catchment, located near Machynlleth in mid-Wales, through a novel instrumental setup to collect the canopy throughfall data in real-time and combining it with satellite-derived forest parameters to simulate the impact of forest management on the river’s streamflow response. Our results, which will be presented during the talk, suggest that this integrated modelling approach is potentially valuable for aiding and informing forest management planning in the future.
About the Speaker
Dr Sopan Patil is a Senior Lecturer at Bangor University with research specialisation in catchment hydrology. Sopan’s research focuses on understanding how climate and land-use change will affect the hydrological response of river basins and quantifying the resilience of linked ecosystem services and hydropower generation potential. He has led research projects focusing on the use of IoT, large sample modelling, and machine learning techniques to support management decisions for run-of-river hydropower generation and flood risk mitigation. Through these projects, he has participated in collaborative research and knowledge transfer activities with several external organisations. Sopan is an editorial board member of the Journal of the American Water Resources Association and a member of the NERC Peer Review College and the UKRI Interdisciplinary Assessment College.