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Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA), Spain

Rafa Marcé is a research scientist at the Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA), Girona, Spain.  His research focuses on carbon cycling, the detection of the effects of global change on fluvial basins, the management of water quality in reservoirs, and the fate of emerging pollutants at the basin scale.  He applies a cross-disciplinary approach in his research, mainly based on field studies and a strong use of modelling, but also considering controlled lab experiments.  Rafa is a member of NETLAKE, GLEON, and SMIRES, and co-coordinated the Lakes Sector in the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP).  He has authored 70 peer-reviewed publications, and is currently participating in several international

research projects (GLOBAQUA, WATExR, PERSIST).  Rafa was a Teaching Assistant at the University of Barcelona form 2005 to 2015, and currently contributes to several Masters courses in Spanish universities.  He has supervised 4 PhD students and 10 BSc and MSc students.

Vicenç Acuña is a research scientist at ICRA, where his research focuses on ecosystem services and pharmaceuticals fate and effects, thus aiming to better integrate different disciplines and provide a better feedback to policy makers. During his PhD (2000-2004), and first postdoc as Fulbright scholar in the US, Vicenç focused his research on flow regime influences on carbon metabolism, as well as on the ecology of temporary streams. Subsequently, in Switzerland (2007-2009), he included temperature as key driver of carbon metabolism in his research, and also became interested in characterizing temperature regime alterations in space and time. From 2009 onwards, Vicenç initiated 2 new research lines, on ecosystem services and on

pharmaceuticals fate and effects. In the past 5 years, he also started to become more interested in the science to policy interface.  Vicenç has been awarded with 1 EU project as Principle Investigator (Marie Curie Reintegration Grant) and has been work package leader in the CONSOLIDER-INGENIO project SCARCE, as well as on the FP7 project GLOBAQUA.

Elias Munthali is the ESR for Mantel Project 9. Elias is an environmental engineer, specialising in drinking water treatment and quality management.  He undertook an internship at the City of Racine Health Department, Wisconsin, USA, where his research concerned two beaches with historical persistent water quality issue which prohibited recreational use.  His role explored establishing an off-shore swim zone where water quality could consistently meet swimming criteria; Mapping water quality from the shore to determine minimum safe wading distances before users started swimming; Developing predictive models for forecasting E. coli densities using environmental variables for rapid beach usage decision making; and

Determining appropriate permanent sampling locations that represent overall water quality for the beaches.

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