Maija Taka

Aalto University · Department of Built Environment

Safeguarding lives and properties during major disasters, such as floods, relies on timely and comprehensive communication and dissemination of early warning information. According to UNDRR, an effective Early Warning System (EWS) consists of four pillars: risk knowledge, monitoring and warning services, dissemination and communication and response...

Despite being a topical issue in public debate and on the political agenda for many countries, a global-scale, high-resolution quantification of migration and its major drivers for the recent decades remained missing. We created a global dataset of annual net migration between 2000 and 2019 (~10 km grid, covering the areas of 216 countries or sover...

In today’s rapidly changing and increasingly interconnected world, engineering educators are required to implement active pedagogical approaches to support students’ interdisciplinary problem-solving processes. However, interdisciplinary and experiential learning may evoke situations where students question their past learnings and even existing va...

High crop yield variation between years—caused by extreme shocks on the food production system such as extreme weather—can have substantial effects on food production. This in turn introduces vulnerabilities into the global food system. To mitigate the effects of these shocks, there is a clear need to understand how different adaptive capacity meas...

Previous studies have evaluated how changes in atmospheric nitrogen (N) inputs and cli- mate affect stream N concentrations and fluxes, but none have synthesized data from sites around the globe. We identified variables controlling stream inorganic N concentrations and fluxes, and how they have changed, by synthesizing 20 time series ranging from 5...

The world's urban population is soaring, with an increasing number of people exposed to urban natural hazards such as riverine floods and storm surges. The global quantification of their extent is, however, still blurred. The ongoing surge in high-resolution data allows novel opportunities for quantification of hazards and exposure. Here, we provid...

Despite being a top concern on global agenda, global-scale, high resolution quantification of net-migration and its major drivers, is still missing for recent decades. We created a global dataset of annual net-migration between 2000–2019 (~ 10km grid), based on reported and here-downscaled sub-national birth and death ratios. We show that globally,...

Well-functioning teams with clear roles and advanced processes have a high potential to initiate peer learning and thus interdisciplinary collaboration. The need for interdisciplinary excellence is a modern-day phenomenon that characterizes all research, including water research. In this paper, we argue that by focusing on developing team culture a...

We identified variables controlling stream nitrogen concentrations and fluxes, and how they have changed over time, by synthesizing 20 time series ranging from 5 to 51 years of data collected from forest and grassland dominated watersheds across Europe, North America, and East Asia and across four climate types (tropical, temperate, Mediterranean,...

Urban hydrology is characterized by increased runoff and various pollutant sources. We studied the spatio-temporal patterns of stormwater metal (Al, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Cu, Zn, and Pb) concentrations and loads in five urbanized and one rural catchment in Southern Finland. The two-year continuous monitoring revealed a non-linear seasonal relationship bet...

Migration manifests an important response and adaptation measure to changes in the environment and socioeconomic conditions. In a time when environmental stressors and risks are unprecedentedly increasing, understanding the interplay between the underlying factors driving migration is of high importance. While the relationships between environmenta...

We argue that doctoral education in water needs an elevated focus towards educating game changers who can drive innovation and change towards more sustainable futures across academic and non-academic settings. Today's doctoral graduates in water are increasingly employed outside academia, and challenged to understand complex and interconnected syst...

Food production on our planet is dominantly based on agricultural practices developed during stable Holocene climatic conditions. Although it is widely accepted that climate change perturbs these conditions, no systematic understanding exists on where and how the major risks for entering unprecedented conditions may occur. Here, we address this gap...

Preprint is openly available at https://doi.org/10.31223/X5MK7H. ABSTRACT: Climate change will alter key climatic conditions which human societies directly rely on and which, for example, food production is adjusted to. Here, using Holdridge Life Zones, we define Safe Climatic Space (SCS), a concept that incorporates the decisive climatic charact...

Preprint is openly available at https://doi.org/10.31223/X5MK7H. ABSTRACT: Climate change will alter key climatic conditions which human societies directly rely on and which, for example, food production is adjusted to. Here, using Holdridge Life Zones, we define Safe Climatic Space (SCS), a concept that incorporates the decisive climatic charact...

Understanding interlinkages among UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is pivotal for the success of Agenda 2030. Here, we use water, a key sustainability resource, to advance SDG science by (1) assessing the synergies and trade-offs of improved water security on achieving the SDGs, (2) examining all the SDGs simultaneously, and (3) using a st...

PUBLISHED IN NATURE FOOD; OPEN ACCESS (VIEW ONLY) ARTICLE AVAILABE AT: https://rdcu.be/b3C3K. The distance between the origin and end-point of food supply chains, and the ‘localness’ of food systems, are key considerations of many narratives associated with sustainability. Yet, information on the minimum distance to food crops is still scarce at t...

Freshwater is one of the most critical elements for sustainable development of ecosystems and societies. River basins, concomitant with administrative zones, form a common unit for freshwater management. So far, no comprehensive, global analysis exists that would link the ecological challenges of the planet's river basins to the capacity of the soc...

Availability of remotely sensed and openly available land cover datasets is rapidly improving. This opens promising possibilities for utilizing such data in urban hydrological assessments. However, it remains unknown how the performance of readily available land cover data compares with manually collated information when used to construct detailed...

Context Place-based transdisciplinary research involves multiple academic disciplines and non-academic actors. Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) platform is one concept with ~ 80 initiatives globally. Objectives As an exercise in learning through evaluation we audited (1) the siting, construction and maintenance of individual LTSER platf...

Informal settlements i.e., slums emerge from the interplay of multidimensional factors related to urbanization and sustainability. While the contribution of urban factors is well understood, the role of external drivers, such as uncontrolled migration to urban areas, is rarely addressed in research or policy-making. This study develops a novel conc...

An increasing amount of high-resolution global spatial data are available, and used for various assessments. However, key economic and human development indicators are still mainly provided only at national level, and downscaled by users for gridded spatial analyses. Instead, it would be beneficial to adopt data for sub-national administrative unit...

While approximately 338 million people in the Northern hemisphere live in regions that are regularly snow covered in winter, there is little hydro-climatologic knowledge in the cities impacted by snow. Using observations and modelling we have evaluated the energy and water exchanges of four cities that are exposed to wintertime snow. We show that t...

The predicted increase in the number of urban flood events can result in substantial monetary losses to society. These costs may be alleviated by preserving ecosystem services, such as urban runoff management. We studied the monetary value of this ecosystem service by applying the replacement cost method in six catchments with varying land-use inte...

An open source subcatchment generator program was developed for the Stormwater Management Model (SWMM) to automate tedious stages in the model construction process. The generator divides the investigated area into subcatchments using a uniform computation grid and connects the grid cells together and to the underlying stormwater network. The system...

Multiple natural and anthropogenic factors affect urban water chemistry. However, little is known about the abundance or temporal variation of major ions in urban runoff. This study explores the spatio-temporal variation of major dissolved ions (Na, K, Ca, Mg, Cl, NO3, SO4) and total dissolved solids (TDS) in cold climate urban stormwater. Three wa...

Rainfall-runoff simulations in urban environments require meteorological input data with high temporal and spatial resolutions. The availability of precipitation data is constantly increasing due to the shift towards more open data sharing. However, the applicability of such data for urban runoff assessments is often unknown. Here, the feasibility...

Identifying the factors controlling stream water pollutants is challenged by the diversity of potential sources, pathways, and processes. This study tests the effects of watershed characteristics on stream water metal concentrations across environmental gradients. By using an extensive data set of 83 watersheds in southern Finland and structural eq...

It is widely known that intensive land use generally decreases stream water quality, but the influence of watershed physiography is relatively poorly understood. Since management planning has to take into account the protection of water quality, the current status of stream water must be identified. The potential effects of land use and watershed p...

The Surface Urban Energy and Water Balance Scheme (SUEWS) is developed to include snow. The processes addressed include accumulation of snow on the different urban surface types: snow albedo and density aging, snow melting and re-freezing of meltwater. Individual model parameters are assessed and independently evaluated using long-term observations...

The Surface Urban Energy and Water balance Scheme (SUEWS) is developed to include snow. The processes addressed include accumulation of snow on the different urban surface types; snow albedo and density aging; snow melting and re-freezing of melt water. Individual model parameters are assessed and independently evaluated using long-term observation...

Due to urbanization, the local hydrology is exposed to severe changes as surfaces are sealed causing hydrological changes such as more surface runoff and pollution loads (Novotny 1995; Semanedi-Davies 2004; Gaston 2010). In this study the impact of land use on storm water load is being studied with three urban sub-catchment area in Helsinki, Sout...