About Marc Bierkens

Marc Bierkens (1965) is professor of Geographical Hydrology at Utrecht University and a water resources researcher at Deltares. His fields of expertise are groundwater hydrology, ecohydrology, stochastic hydrology, hydrological regionalisation, upscaling theory and geostatistics and global hydrology. He investigates whether sufficient water will be available in the future for a growing world population.

His current research focuses on global-scale hydrological modelling in relation to climate change and water availability. His research group collaborated on mapping global water scarcity and groundwater depletion and the salinisation of groundwater of coasts and deltas. Water scarcity occurs when the demand for water exceeds the amount of water available. This is increasingly the case in the Netherlands too; drinking water companies are running up against their limits due to high water demand and low groundwater levels, which also affect farmers and nature.

To support this work, his group has built a high-resolution global hydrological and water resources model. The results of these models are frequently used in public outreach (e.g. the national Geographic World Water Map) and to support web application to aid NGOs and companies in water risk assessments (e.g. the World Resources Institute Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas).

Marc Bierkens is fellow of the American Geophysical Union since 2016 and is editor of the journal Water Resources Research. He was chairman of the Boussinesq Center, the network of university hydrology groups in the Netherlands (2007-2011) and of the Netherlands Hydrology Society (2011-2017), which represents over 600 Dutch hydrology professionals. He co-organised the IAHS ModelCARE conference in 2005 in The Netherlands. He was supervisor on 31 completed PhD theses and has been a committee member on more than 90. Marc Bierkens (co-) authored about 240 publications, 200 of which appeared in international peer-reviewed journals. He is principal author of the book Upscaling and Downscaling Methods for Environmental Research (2002), co-author of the book Sampling for Natural Resource Monitoring (2006) and editor of the book Climate and the Hydrological Cycle (2008).

Lauded

Marc Bierkens received in April 2023 the EGU awardHenry Darcy Medal from the Hydrological Sciences Division at the European Geosciences Union. It was awarded in recognition of outstanding scientific contributions towards understanding the depletion of surface and groundwater resources related to human use and climate change. The AGU (American Geophysical Union), the world's largest society within the Earth and Space Sciences, also in December 2023 added him to the gallery of honour for his "extraordinary contributions to the science of hydrology over the course of his career". Finally, Marc was appointed as a member of the KNAW, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, as the first and only hydrologist.