The Black Sea catchment (BSC) is facing important demographic, climatic and landuse changes that may increase pollution, vulnerability and scarcity of water resources, as well as beach erosion through sea level rise. Limited access to reliable time-series monitoring data from environmental, statistical, and socio-economical sources is a major barrier to policy development and decision-making. To address these issues, a web-based platform was developed to enable discovery and access to key environmental information for the region. This platform covers: landuse, climate, and demographic scenarios; hydrology and related water vulnerability and scarcity; as well as beach erosion. Each data set has been obtained with state-of-the-art modelling tools from available monitoring data using appropriate validation methods. These analyses were conducted using global and regional data sets. The data sets are intended for national to regional assessments, for instance for prioritizing environmental protection projects and investments. Together they form a unique set of information, which lay out future plausible change scenarios for the BSC, both for scientific and policy purposes.
Beaches
Maximum beach retreat (in percentage of the maximum beach width) predicted by the model ensemble for the Black Sea beaches under a 0.5 m SLR (coastal retreat estimated to 21.4 m.).
Climate
This dataset consists of estimated values for the monthly averages of maximum and minimum temperatures, as well as precipitation for the time period between 1961 and 1990, interpolated with the integrated nested Laplace approximations. It provides the estimated values for the daily observations of maximum temperature for the HB1 and HS1 scenarios between 2070 and 2100, obtained through the Delta method.
Demography
UN projection variants for population (Table 3), downscaled from national to regional level (NUTS2). Results include urban and total population trends over the period 2010-2050 for the 214 Black sea regions, consistent with BS HOT, BS ALONE, BS COOP and BS COOL scenarios.
Land Use change scenarios
The data consist in a set of nine raster maps representing the Land Use classification derived from MODIS in 2010 at a 500m pixel resolution, and predicted with Metronamica until 2050 according to the HOT, ALONE, COOP and COOL scenarios. Each map of LU is subdivided into 10 classes. On one hand, crops/natural vegetation, shrubland, barren or sparsely vegetated, forest, grassland, croplands and urban and built-up areas are changing along the years. On the other hand, water, snow and ice, and permanent wetlands remain fixed.
Land_use_change_scenarios.zip
SWAT hydrological outputs
The monthly average water flow Figure 3. River flow simulated by the Black Sea SWAT model in m3/s and nitrogen loads simulated by the Black Sea SWAT model between years 1970 to 2006 is made available over 12982 subcatchments and their corresponding river reaches.
SWAT_hydrological_outputs.zip
Water for agriculture vulnerability
This map provides an overview of the potential impact of climate change on agriculture over 12982 subcatchments. It is measured in the change of annual plant growth days. Green indicates an increase of plant growth days due to fewer days of water stress and/or fewer days of temperature stress (positive potential impact). Red indicates a decrease of plant growth days due to more days of water stress and/or temperature stress (negative potential impact). The potential impact is very heterogeneous across the Black Sea catchment. The adaptive irrigation capacity and the total agriculture vulnerability is also made available in this dataset.
Water_agriculture_vulnerability.zip
Water scarcity
This aim of this dataset is to represent water stress in the Black Sea catchment circa 2011. Water stress is calculated according to the Water Stress Index (WSI) corresponding to the quotient of total withdrawals by surface water availability, both in m3 yr-1. The scale of this index is as follow: <0.1 = No stress; 0.1 to 0.2 = Low; 0.2 to 0.4 = Moderate; 0.4 to 0.8 = High; >0.8 = Very high. Several building blocks used to assess water stress are also made available as geospatial layers in this dataset.
Water_scarcity.zip