Soil organic carbon stockage is a key process to mitigate climate change and is intertwined with soil temperature and moisture and of other secondary soil properties. This study shows the significance of secondary drivers in the relationship between soil moisture and microbial efficiency in soil organic carbon degradation. Using empirical relationships in a global ecosystem model enhanced significantly the heterogeneous spatial pattern of soil organic carbon stock and carbon dioxide fluxes.

The Explore2 project has provided an unprecedented set of hydrological projections in terms of the number of hydrological models used and the spatial and temporal resolution. The results have been made available through various media. Under the high-emission scenario, the hydrological models mostly agree on the decrease in seasonal flows in the south of France, confirming its hotspot status, and on the decrease in summer flows throughout France, with the exception of the northern part of France.

The evolution of irrigation under climate change is analyzed between 1950 and 2100. Results indicate that the influence of irrigation on evapotranspiration in irrigated areas increases in the future (compared to an historical period). Also, the effect of irrigation on water resources is also higher in the future than in the historical period. Finally, we identify areas where future hydroclimate conditions can limit irrigation, or areas where irrigation can increase tensions around water use.

We conducted a high-resolution hydrological simulation from 1959 to 2020 across France. We used a simple trial-and-error calibration to reduce the biases of the simulated water budget compared to observations. The selected simulation satisfactorily reproduces water fluxes, including their spatial contrasts and temporal trends. This work offers a reliable historical overview of water resources and a robust configuration for climate change impact analysis at the nationwide scale of France.

Runoff simulation is complex in poorly gauged and data-scarce hydrosystems of the West African Sahel. The results of this study showed that multi-sites calibration without nested sub-catchments is the best modelling scheme for capturing the hydrological response of the Sahelian catchments. This approach could therefore be applied to obtain regionalized parameter values for the West African Sahel region from small catchments distributed across all climatic zones.