Details of the Working Group
Outreach, Communication, and Promoting the Digital Water Globe: Lead by Christina Orieschnig and Soham Adla
Communication is key to achieving the aims of the IAHS’ current scientific decade, HELPING. Working with colleagues across the globe and across disciplines, integrating knowledge across scales, and engaging local communities all involves considerable (science) communication and outreach efforts.
The aim of this working group is to facilitate these efforts within the IAHS community, and to document challenges and best practices throughout the decade. Furthermore, we aim to increase the visibility of the Digital Water Globe, a platform developed by IAHS to allow researchers in hydrology to connect with each other and with practitioners, to contextualize their work within space, and to link their efforts to larger initiatives such as HELPING, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the Unsolved Problems in Hydrology.
Are you interested in science communication and outreach? Do you want to help give the Digital Water Globe a boost? Join us!
Click here to subscribe to the mailing list of the working group for opportunities to become involved.
Click here to read the full mission statement and working group strategy
Working Group Activities
Currently, the principal effort of the working group is a community paper on science communication in hydrology - specifically documenting current challenges and best-practice efforts to overcome them. Over the past year, the working group has organised in-person and online workshops, interviewed long-term IAHS volunteers who participated in past scientific decades, gathered the perspectives of actors from local water managers to World Bank project coordinators, and launched a digital survey. The community paper is currently in its second draft and will be submitted by April.
Further activities include a systematic promotion of HELPING and the Digital Water Globe, for instance through blogs such as those of the EGU Hydrological Sciences Division and the Young Hydrologic Society. We are also organising talks, for instance as part of the “Gotta Catchment All” Series by the British Hydrological Society to highlight the IAHS’ efforts.
Working Group News
What’s new in the working group?
We have two upcoming splinter meetings during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU25) in Vienna, Austria (April 27 - May 2):
SPM2: How Can the IAHS’ Digital Water Globe Enhance Your Research Visibility and Improve Network Connectivity in a Society Under Transformation?
SPM3: Outreach, (Science) Communication and Promoting the Digital Water Globe in HELPING, the New Scientific Decade of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS)
We look forward to seeing many of you there!
Furthermore, an abstract on the community paper has been submitted for the XIIth Scientific Assembly of the IAHS (IAHS25) in Roorkee, India (October 5 -10)