D. Charchousi’s Doctoral Thesis Presentation

On Tuesday, December 2, 2025, Ms. Despoina Charchousi, a graduate of the National Technical University of Athens School of Civil Engineering and a research associate of the Laboratory of Physical Geography and Environmental Impacts, presented her doctoral thesis titled “Assessment and Management of Groundwater Dependent Ecosystems (GDEs) and Ecosystem Services with the Combined Use of Mapping Methodologies and the Groundwater Footprint (GWF)”.

Supervisor, Prof. of NTUA Ms. Maria P. Papadopoulou and members of the Committee, Associate Prof. of NTUA Ms. Ekaterini Nanou-Yiannarou and Prof. of AUTH Mr. Nikolaos Theodosiou. 

The presentation took place in the Conference Hall of the School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens, in the Vei Building. 

Ms. Charchousi’s doctoral thesis focuses on investigating the use of the groundwater water footprint (GWF) and on developing tools for monitoring and managing groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs) and associated ecosystem services. 

In particular, it concentrates on the development of a methodological framework for mapping groundwater ecosystems, through the combined use of remote sensing data and geographic information systems. 

Furthermore, it focuses on identifying the linkages of groundwater-dependent ecosystem services related to the calculation of the GWF index and Land Use/Land Cover (LULC). 

The thesis concludes with the development of a framework for the integrated assessment of groundwater-dependent ecosystem services, utilizing the developed tools.

Key points

• A framework for classifying ecosystem services provided by groundwater (GDEs) is proposed, in order to lay the foundations for a common terminology.

• The contribution of ecosystem services offered by groundwater to the direct or indirect achievement of specific United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is highlighted.

• An extensive set of parameters related to the existence of groundwater is evaluated in order to propose a final set of criteria that aims to satisfactorily capture the potential of an area in terms of the existence of GDEs and, at the same time, minimize the computational burden and the introduction of overlapping information in the proposed analysis.

• Objective methods for assessing the weight of the criteria related to the existence of GDEs are applied and then evaluated – in terms of the impact on the validity of the produced cartographic information.

• The links between: (a) the groundwater-dependent ecosystem services related to the calculation of the groundwater footprint index (GWF) and (b) land uses/cover (LULC) are identified through expert-based research.

• Correlation matrices of LULC categories with the capacity of an area to provide ecosystem services are utilized to produce maps of potential ecosystem service provision zones.