This research contract between the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computing Sciences of the University of Cantabria (UC) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has been designed to help the Government of Gambia to prepare and submit a full funding proposal to the Green Climate Fund (https://www.greenclimate.fund). This proposal will focus on identifying adaptation measures that can be taken by the fisheries sector in response to major climate change threats (including oceanic, coastal, estuary and freshwater resources). For this to be feasible, UC has been requested to develop the climate change rationale for the proposal, providing a comprehensive picture of the changes in temperature and precipitation that have occurred during the recent past decades within the Gambia River watershed, as well as those which are expected to occur (up to 2100). To do this, different data mining and machine learning techniques will be applied to statistically downscale a catalog of state-of-the-art numerical climate models, running under different emission scenarios, with the objective of transforming their coarse-resolution outputs to the fine-scale that is needed for impact assessment over the target region. This will allow, for instance, to run the SALNST model over the watershed to assess the likelihood of the river becoming hypersaline due to sea level rise and changes in river discharge, which can adversely affect many aquatic/marine species.
