UPV (Coordinator) has strong expertise in numerical modelling and has received grants from competitive national programs to study different aspects of groundwater flow and mass transport in the subsurface. Among these, the project “Who did it? (QSO)” for the identification of contaminant sources in aquifers from observations downstream of the source was possible thanks to the collaboration with the laboratory of UNIPR (Partner 4), with whom UPV maintains an active relationship. UPV was involved in the project MORASMO that dealt with the sustainable management of the Eastern Mancha aquifer and a better understanding of the river-aquifer interactions. The UPV has participated as partner in the FP6-EURATOM project FUNMIG.

UFZ (Partner 2) has strong expertise in water resources management thanks to the EU and public/private German funded research and innovation projects covering various areas of engineering, water and environment. UFZ was involved in the consortium of the EU Bonus MIRACLE project, to investigate new methods, concepts and governance approaches, and to reconcile diverging perceptions linked to different stakeholders on how to address water management issues, including reduced nutrient losses and flood risks, from a systematic perspective. Also, the ENI SEIS II South Project, where UFZ is a partner, aims to contribute to the reduction of marine pollution in the MED by developing a Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS). InTheMED project will also benefit from the ongoing WaterFARMING project (Improvement of water and nutrient retention and use efficiency in arable farming systems from field to catchment scale in Europe and North Africa - ERA-NET Cofund WaterWorks2015), where UFZ and CERTE are two partners. InTheMED will also integrate findings from the TERENO project “Terrestrial Observatory for the Environment” (UFZ is a coordinator), where the HRMA has been implemented since 2010. Finally, the Demonstration and Training Facility (BDZ) for wastewater treatment techniques of the UFZ will be a relevant infrastructure for InTheMED. The BDZ contains twelve different treatment plants operated with state-of-the-art technologies that have been operating continuously at the BDZ-test site in Leipzig since 2005. The BDZ and UFZ jointly offer seminars, workshops and conferences on decentralized wastewater management and reuse.

TUC (Partner 3) team has extensive experience in groundwater characterisation and remediation techniques gained through the participation in several international projects, such as ERMIS-F regarding the use of web services for environmental risk and floods, the THALIS project which concerns the high frequency monitoring system for the integrated Water Resources management of Rivers, and the CHARM project, which is funded under the ‘LIFE+ Environment Policy and Governance’ and focuses on the modelling and remediation of Chromium contamination in the Asopos River Basin groundwater.

UNIPR (Partner 4) has acquired experience and expertise in former Italian and EU projects related to groundwater remediation which are of direct relevance to InTheMED. During the INCORE project a cost-efficient technical-administrative set of tools to optimize the investigation, evaluation and management of contaminated groundwater in urban industrial areas were developed. The new tools developed during the INCORE project were later applied and improved in the FOKS and AMIIGA projects. The FOKS project dealt with management of groundwater pollution by priority industrial pollutants. While, in the ongoing AMIIGA project, the aim is to provide a set of cost-effective tools to manage pollution at a functional urban-area scale.

IST-ID (Partner 5) has been involved in National and EU research projects related to critical changes in the MED region. DesertWatch provided standard and comparable geo-information products (DesertWatch Information System) about the status and trends of desertification in MED countries. The SADMO EU project developed an innovative methodology to efficiently describe desertification processes in the Occidental MED region. Knowledge acquired under the scope of both projects will contribute positively to InTheMED.

CERTE (Partner 6) has gained experience and expertise in former EU projects related to sustainable water management in the MED region. Indeed, the main outputs that will certainly be used for ensuring InTheMED success are: i) the creation of a water cluster alliance and an active EU-MED collaboration (RI universities, NCPs, Technical centres) that was initiated in the framework of the CBWRMED project. This project, coordinated by CERTE, has been selected by the EC as a success story. The main objective of this cluster is to use the EU collaboration as a driver to tackle the water RI challenges in the MED region, ii) the reinforcement of CERTE’s capacity in innovation management and technology transfer to the market through training, workshops, expert missions, brokerage events and water knowledge-innovation-communication (KIC) in the framework of FP4BATIW project, iii) the implementation of various demonstration sites based on RI results in the frame of the Zer0-M project in order to assess the possibilities and limitations of local water management, iv) the implementation of a Tunisian dialogue platform, “the Water Table” in the framework of the SWMED project (CBCMED programme) for local and sustainable water management with the active engagement of various stakeholders.

BU (Partner 7) has participated in numerous projects, among these a recent collaboration with partners from UK, via a research project granted by the British Council and TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) through a Newton Institutional Link, where they study irrigation-induced salinity management in the Konya plain. This project involves components of soil data acquisition, hydraulic experiments, meso-scale salt transport modelling and macroscale system dynamics modelling of irrigation-induced salinity problems. BU has also collaborated on a bilateral research project from 2014 until 2016, funded by the Turkish and Greek national funding agencies (TUBITAK and GSRT). This project focused on the optimization of the remediation of groundwater resources contaminated with organic pollutants in the form of non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs).