In Bolivia, a large proportion of the water supply of the capital city, La Paz, is provided by meltwater from glaciers. During the year glaciers tend to melt when conditions are dry and warm, and so they provide water when it is needed most. However, these glaciers are shrinking rapidly due to climate change, and their reduction and possible total disappearance will reduce the water available for La Paz for drinking water, agriculture and hydropower. It is therefore important to understand exactly how important glaciers are for water supplies and how glacier runoff interacts with vegetation and peatlands, especially during very dry conditions when other sources of water are lacking. It is also necessary to build modelling tools that will allow us to predict how the glaciers and water resources from the catchments will change in the future, since this information can be used to better manage and adapt to the future change in water supply. Our new project will combine scientists that work with state-of-the-art glacier and hydrological models from Northumbria University, UK, with Bolivian glaciologists and hydrologists from Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Bolivia and experts on operational melt models from CIMA Research Foundation in Italy. We will first collect high resolution satellite data for the catchment, create a map of landcover by classifying satellite imagery and install a new weather station on one of the glaciers in the catchment. These data will be used, together with existing datasets and satellite derived products, to run a detailed model that can represent in a physical manner all of the processes that affect the amount of water available for use in the catchment, including from glacier melt, groundwater, evapotranspiration and all the main hydrological processes occurring in high mountain catchments. We will also run a simpler, but faster model over the glacier areas and compare the results of the models. We will then construct a model that can represent the melt of Bolivian glaciers well while remaining efficient enough for use by water managers and for modelling into the future. Through this work, the project will meet the following objectives: 1. Provide a new baseline of glaciological and hydrological data for the La Paz/El Alto water supply catchments; 2. Determine the drivers of glacier melt water contribution to water supply and its interannual fluctuations, including during droughts; 3. Determine the importance of feedback mechanisms between glaciers, snow, hydrology and vegetation in the magnitude and seasonality of catchment runoff and; 4. Establish the model complexity required to adequately represent glacier runoff in operational water resource modelling. The results of our work will be published in peer-reviewed journals, but we will also write a briefing document in Spanish for local stakeholders (water managers and government officials) which will be presented at a dissemination workshop in Bolivia. The project will lead to: a new partnership between the organisations involved; new knowledge of Bolivian glaciers and their importance to water supplies; and the development of operational modelling tools that work well in the region. This will allow us to apply for future funding with the long-term aim of predicting glacier change over the entire Cordillera Real and its effect on water supplies into the future - thereby providing the information needed to better manage Bolivian water resources. This will allow planning for additional catchment water storage, implementation of water use efficiency measures, or the implementation of improved drought prediction systems to enhance decision making about water resources.

In place of writing, textiles in Andean civilizations were developed over millennia by visually literate populations to document and display complex data. Academic studies worldwide are intrigued by this massive cultural use of information display, yet limited in methods of approach. Drawing on new methodologies combining fieldwork, digital documentation, information visualization and ontology, this project develops a common language for understanding Andean cloth to be shared between Visual, Computer and Museum Studies. \n\nResearch to date has established that textiles bear messages. Some are understood; others are still inaccessible due to the incomplete data sets available for scrutiny, discontinuous time sequences of samples, and limited correlation with comparative materials from the ethnographic and historical record, and commentaries from living weavers. To overcome this, we opt for regional rather than local sampling procedures to give us greater access to materials, while our interdisciplinary approach promotes greater sample contextualization. \n\nThrough data mining and other web-based techniques, this wider sample contextualization will be articulated to a digital structural mapping of cloth. Our hypothesis is that weaving techniques, as conservative organising features, have ontological associations that can be mapped in a working grammar of textile design, and correlated with socio-cultural and historical data. Centred in a weaver's perspective, our approach goes beyond the analysis of surface features of cloth to give precedence to its technical and structural properties. Existing software, adapted to express Andean cloth's 3D nature, will feed into our database design, together with digital photos, video and text data. Our interface design gives priority to content-oriented access, and a graphical concept browser, to express this weaving perspective visually.\n\nDatabase documentation, building on the site at the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies, Birkbeck College London (bbk.ac.uk/cilavs), will systematize visual textile information, permitting academic disciplines an ontology-based exploration of weaving structures that map the social semiotic relations between cultural practices and identities. Workshops with curators of European and Latin American collections will coordinate information collection, methods, and analysis. \n\nThe main project stages of data collection, analysis and organisation, articulated to innovative means of access and analysis, have broad cognitive and curatorial goals. A secondary applied aspect responds to concerns of regional weavers to defend their cultural patrimony from piracy, and introduce local weaving repertories into new educational curricula. Our software and database design will respond to both these needs. \n\nResearch context\nResearch in Bolivia, Peru and Chile, combined with museum research there and in the UK, focuses on 3 regions on the basis of previous ethnographic, archaeological and museological knowledge and contacts, and 3 time horizons: Tiwanaku, the Inka-early colony, and the contemporary.\n\nThis study is urgent. As a result of former educational trends, ignoring regional textile production in favour of an emerging global textile industry, modern forms of literacy, and out-migration from rural communities, younger generations no longer want to weave. Current NGO interventions too are changing regional design repertories, and hence historical continuities and identity questions. At the same time, contemporary politics are generating alternative educational demands that seek new identity-based curricula in a decolonizing context. Our ethnographic research concerns the cultural rescue of endangered weaving practices, while providing new methods to document and link them to emerging industries.\n

Life on land depends upon freshwater. Mountains act as water towers, producing water by lifting moist air, and by providing temporary surface and below-ground storage of water for later release into rivers. These stores are particularly important in regions that experience seasonal droughts, as snow and ice melt can counteract reduced rainfall during dry spells. Two main natural depots of frozen water exist. Snow is a short-term store, delaying the release of water after snowfall on daily to seasonal timescales. Ice melt also releases water seasonally. However, glacier ice is a longer-term reservoir, storing water for decades to centuries. A similar behaviour can be observed in the non-frozen part of a mountain catchment. Stores such as wetlands, ponds and shallow below-ground flow provide short-term storage, while lakes and deeper groundwater show long-term release characteristics. The combination of these different processes determines the magnitude and behaviour of a mountain range's water tower function for the surrounding area. This is particularly important in the Andes, where some of the most important water towers of the globe are found. The human population in regions neighbouring the Andes depend on mountain water resources for drinking, food production and hydropower, as do animals and plant life. Unfortunately, human-induced climate change is altering the stores of water held in the Andes water towers. Greenhouse gas emissions mean that snow-bearing weather conditions are becoming less frequent, depleting the stocks of snow held in the mountains. The lack of replenishing snow, and increasing temperatures, are causing glaciers to lose the ice they store, retreating to the higher and colder portions of the mountains. In combination with climate change impacts on the rest of the catchment, this is contributing to water shortages across the Andes. Ongoing droughts are hitting high-population cities, where the concentration of people increases the demand for water. For example, the cities of Lima and Huaraz (Peru), La Paz (Bolivia) and Santiago (Chile), are all situated in catchments where snow and ice melt contribute to river flow. However, upstream rural areas, which are less adaptable to climate change, are often even more directly reliant upon snow and ice meltwater. This impacts irrigation for agriculture, stressing the food security of the region. To help manage these changes to water supplies, this project aims to achieve two things. The first is to provide better monitoring. The high altitudes of the Andes are poorly instrumented. To work out where and how fast conditions are changing, we will install more scientific instruments to measure snow, weather and river discharge. To contextualise the changes we can measure now, we need longer observational records extending back in time. Many glaciers have been retreating since 1850, leaving behind an imprint in the landscape which we will map. Using satellite imagery, we can track the retreat of these glaciers from the 1970s to their present position. We will also utilise records of past climate conditions, recorded by sailors in ships-log books and stored in the landscape in sediments. Our second goal is to project future changes, which requires computer models of climate, glacier and river processes. Such projections are required for policy makers, who need to be reliably informed of potential future change. We will combine state-of-the-art models, to simulate the changing water resources in ten Andean catchments. To assess the skill of our models at making predictions, we will test them against our observations of past conditions and current changes. Models that perform well at replicating observed conditions will be used to project a range of possible future climate scenarios. By combining these observational and model-based approaches, we will improve the approach to projecting water resource change, and help to inform water management plans.