Research Highlights

Click on description to access manuscripts.
A complete list of publications classified by research subject is available [here] and on Dr Muller's [Google Scholar Profile]

Land Grabs

Nature Communications:
​What are the consequences of transnational agricultural land deals on water security?

[Press release]

PNAS
​What are the consequences of large transnational agricultural land deals on food security?
​
[Press release]

Nature Food (in Review): 
​What are the consequences of transnational agricultural land deals on forest cover and biodiversity?

Water and Armed Conflicts

PNAS 
​Will changing rainfall distribution increase or decrease the propensity for armed conflicts?
​
[ScienceBreaker]
[Press Release]

​PNAS
​How do Violent Conflicts affect Land and Water Resources? Evidence from Syria

​[Brookings]
[Nature Asia]
[SNF Horizons]

[In Review]
​How does refugee migration redistribute global water stress?

[Preprint]

Transboundary Groundwater 

National Science Foundation Grant ICER 1824951: "CNH: What does it take to collaborate over transboundary groundwater resources?"

Water Resources Research: 
How did an international agreement emerge over fossil groundwater in the Arabian Desert?

Advances in Water Resources:
What role can trust play in the emergence of transboundary groundwater treaties?

Water Resources Research (in review): 
​How do economic and hydro-geologic differences between countries affect their propensity to collaborate over groundwater?

[Preprint]

Transboundary Rivers

Water Resources Research:
Was the Ganges Water Treaty effective at reducing downstream river salinity?

Journal of Hydrology :
How should the Ganges Water Treaty be re-designed to account for climate change?

[Preprint]

Hydrology and Earth Syst. Science:
What made the flow of the Jhelum river in the transboundary Indus basin decrease by 50% in the last 20 years?

Socio-Hydrology of Climate Change

National Science Foundation Grant EAR 2142967: "CAREER: CAS-Climate: Sociohydrology to link climate change and its societal impacts"
[Press]

Environmental Research Letters:
​On how increasingly variable rainfall and higher temperature might conspire to produce even more variable stream flows!

Hydrological Sciences Journal (Invited):
On the compatibility and complementary of sociohydrology and ecohydrology to study hydroclimatic change in human-altered watersheds.

Water Resources Research (Invited):
On the compatibility of economics and hydrology to study coupled human-water systems. 

Our Approach

Questions that we Ask

• How are socio-environmental systems changing in data-scarce regions?
• What are the key drivers of these changes? To what extent can they be attributed to exogenous (e.g. global climate) or endogenous (poor policy) sources?
• Will there be more more conflicts in a changed climate where water resources will be more variable? What role (if any) will physical landscape processes play in that relationship?
• What does it take for cooperation to emerge over internationally shared water resources? What role does trust and information access play in that process?
• When does human (trade, migration, information) and hydrologic (rivers) connectivity enhance societal resilience to climate shocks?
• How can new information paradigms (e.g., remote sensing, modeling and social sensing) and modern data analytics be used to address critical information gaps for improved water, health and energy policy?​

Methods that we develop

We combine data science, hydrologic modeling and economics to monitor, evaluate and predict rapidly changing coupled human water systems in data-scarce regions. An overview of our approaches and focus areas can be found in a recently published review paper in Water Resources Research [click here for access].

A non exhaustive sample of the methods that we developed is listed below -- please click on the keywords for example publications. A full list of publications is provided in the "Publications" tab of this website.

Data analytics:

• Remote sensing of cropland
• Remote sensing of reservoirs (optical imagery)
• Coastal Remote sensing (Synthetic Aperture Radar)
• Remote sensing of precipitations
• Geostatistics
• Bayesian model evaluation (value of information)
• webGIS and DEM analysis

Hydrologic modeling:

• Stochastic, process-based modeling of baseflow distribution
• Regression-based predictions in ungauged catchments
• Groundwater modeling
• Baseflow recession
• Intra-annual and inter-annual variability

Economics

• Difference-In-Difference analysis
• Regression Discontinuity
• Instrumental Variable
• Non-cooperative game theory
• Micro-economic theory 

Funded Projects

• US National Science Foundation, Dynamics Coupled Human Natural Systems grant #1824951: "What does it take to collaborate over transboundary groundwater resources?"
• US National Science Foundation, Hydrological Science (joint with Human Geography) grant # 2142967: "CAREER: CAS-Climate: Sociohydrology to link climate change and its societal impacts" 
• BHP Group, Ltd: "Rights-based water governance"

Get in touch

The University of Notre Dame is located in the city of South Bend, IN, two hours by car east of Chicago.
​
​The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences is located in Fitzpatrick Hall, directly northeast of the football stadium