ИСТИНА

The Selenga River is the main artery feeding Lake Baikal. It has a catchment of ~450.000 km² in the boundary region between Northern Mongolia and Southern Siberia. Climate, land use and socioeconomic changes go along with rising water abstractions and contaminant loads originating from mining sites and urban waste water. In the future, these pressures might have negative impacts on the ecosystems of Lake Baikal and the Selenga River Delta, which is an important wetland region in itself and forms the last geobiochemical barrier before the Selenga drains into Lake Baikal. Our study aims to evaluate the impacts of climate and land use changes as well as point and non-point contamination on the hydrology and water quality in the Selenga River Basin. We are combining data and model-driven approaches to assess the current and future threats and identify the most relevant stressors. Key steps of the study involve (a) assembling all currently accessible data on discharge and water quality in the Selenga River Basin in an online geodatabase; (b) characterizing recent changes in the hydrology and contaminant loads due to climatic developments and human impacts and (c) assessing different hydrological and water quality models (particularly WaterGAP and ECOMAG) with regard to their ability to predict future trends in hydrology and water quality given the current data availability.