Dear IAHS and Panta Rhei members,

This e-news brings you the latest news from Panta Rhei at the IAHS Port Elizabeth Assembly.

New Panta Rhei Biennium 2017 – 2019

We are very pleased to announce that the IAHS Bureau has voted to accept the handover of the Panta Rhei leadership from the 2015 – 2017 Biennium to the 2017 – 2019 Biennium. This announcement was made to the participants of the IAHS Scientific Assembly in Port Elizabeth (South Africa) during the Plenary on 13 July. The new Panta Rhei leadership is as follows:

Panta Rhei Chair 2017-2019:

·         Giuliano di Baldassarre, Uppsala University, Sweden

Leadership Team 2017-2019:

·         Veena Srinivasan, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bangalore

·         Fuqiang Tian, Tsinghua University, Beijing

·         Yasir Mohamed, UNESCO IHE, Netherlands

·         Tobias Krueger, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

·         Junguo Liu, South University of Science and Technology of China

·         Amir AghaKouchack, University of California, Irvine, USA

·         Heidi Kreibich, Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, Germany

·         Tara Troy, Lehigh University, USA

 

Panta Rhei Meeting at Port Elizabeth

A Panta Rhei meeting took place on Wednesday 12 July at the IAHS 2017. The meeting was chaired by Giuliano Di Baldassarre. Hubert Savenjie introduced the event, which was then followed by three brief talks and a 45-minute debate.

Alberto Montanari summarized the origins of Panta Rhei and the overarching research questions, Berit Arhemeir presented the potential of SWITCH-ON Virtual Water Science Lab IT to support scientific collaboration, and Junguo Liu showed some of the most recent activities with a focus on developing countries.

An open discussion was then facilitated by Giuliano Di Baldassarre. The debate aimed to get feedback on ongoing and future activities, and keep shaping together the Panta Rhei research agenda. There was a general consensus on the need to produce open databases and tools, support cooperation within the IAHS community, keep the focus on early career scientists, and connect with other research communities, including human geographers, behavioral economists, sociologists and political scientists. Various challenges were also discussed. Scientific challenges, such as the understanding of hydrological change in the Anthropocene, whereby humans are key drivers of change, and methodological challenges, including both opportunities and difficulties in collaborating and engaging with social scientists.

Panta Rhei and SWITCH-ON

A new partnership between Panta Rhei and the SWITCH-ON Virtual Water Science Lab, which we hope will assist Panta Rhei working groups to participate in joint projects. This new tool is launched at the IAHS website for data sharing and collaborative experiments: http://www.switch-on-vwsl.eu/

Each working group can start thematic discussions in the Forum and also create protocols. The VWSL aims to facilitate collaboration despite of geographical distances, as well as transparency of computational workflows. We hope that these tools will serve the IAHS community to advance science and comparative hydrology through more efficient collaboration across the globe. The SWITCH-ON Virtual Water-Science Laboratory was demonstrated in the Poster Hall every day during coffee breaks and poster sessions at the IAHS 2017.

Panta Rhei Activities 2016 – 2017

Panta Rhei had a busy year during 2016 – 2017. One new working group was formed, “Comparative Study on the Co-Evolution of Coupled Human-Water Systems”, bringing the total number of groups to 32 (with a total of more than 400 members).

More details of all our working groups, and the latest Panta Rhei News, can be found on our website at http://iahs.info/Commissions--W-Groups/Working-Groups/Panta-Rhei/  

A dedicated Panta Rhei Day Workshop was held in Vienna, where we continued to build on Panta Rhei activities including a discussion of the best ways to energise your own working group! See here http://iahs.info/uploads/Panta%20Rhei/How%20to%20revitalise%20your%20Panta%20Rhei%20working%20group.pdf  for a short summary.

Panta Rhei is creating an online map with overview information of working group projects and Panta Rhei members. Watch this space as we hope to release the first version by the end of 2017. We continue our ongoing opinion paper series in Hydrological Sciences Journal: you can find more information about the series here: http://iahs.info/News.do?news_id=201  .

Panta Rhei has organised conference sessions at EGU, AGU, and workshops in UK and China. The upcoming 2nd IAHS Panta Rhei International Workshop will be held in Iran in November.

For more details on all these activities will soon be available in the Panta Rhei annual report.

With kind regards,

Hilary McMillan: Panta Rhei Chair 2015 – 2017
Giuliano di Baldassarre: Panta Rhei Chair 2017 – 2019

 IAHS are pleased to announce that the SWITCH-ON Virtual Water-Science Lab. is now available through the IAHS website (in the Panta Rhei section and the Links page). This Lab was developed by a group of IAHS researchers and will be demonstrated during the whole week of the IAHS 2017 Scientific Assembly in Port Elizabeth in July 2017 in the poster section of  room B2. The project phase is ending and the Lab is now offered as a tool for the IAHS community and the working groups of Panta Rhei.

SWITCH-ON is an EU-funded FP7 project with 15 partners across Europe (duration 2013 - 2017, grant agreement no. 603587). One main focus is share data, tools and computational scripts between scientists and research groups world-wide. The Lab also enable transparency and reproducibility of scientific experiments.

Suggestions for improvement to the Lab with the inclusion of more tools are highly appreciated. Please contact Berit Arheimer or Lorna Little.

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About VWSL

Why use the Virtual Water Science Laboratory (VWSL) ?

The VWSL should facilitate collaboration and support reproducible experiments in water research. The goal is to overcome geographical distance for comparative hydrology and increase transparency when using computational tools in hydrological sciences. The VWSL gives access to open data through dedicated software tools for data search and upload, and helps creating protocols for joint experiments in the virtual environment. The SWITCH-ON VWSL will help you as a scientist with:

Cooperation around the world - helps you to connect with other scientists in comparative analyses and collaboration, as a mean to accelerate scientific advance in your research field.

Repeatability* of experiments – enables thorough review of a large variety of numerical experiments, which is a foundational principle in scientific research and will raise your standards.

New forms of scientific research – by using online ‘living’ protocols you can elaborate ideas incrementally with a large group of colleagues and share data, tools, models, etc. in open science.

More information can be found at http://www.switch-on-vwsl.eu/ 

The Second IAHS Panta Rhei International Workshop on

Water System Knowledge Innovation and its Practices in Developing Countries

November 20-22, 2017
Gorgan, Iran

 The four main objectives for this workshop are:

(1)                 To understand major water system problems and their root causes particularly in developing countries in coupled nature-human systems;

(2)                 To demonstrate current hydrological knowledge of models, tools and case studies to deal with water system problems e.g. water scarcity, water-related disasters, groundwater depletion, water-related poverty and conflicts;

(3)                 To identify demand for hydrological innovation to meet the grand water system challenges particularly IWM under the severe climate change conditions as well as under unstable policy and management conditions; and

(4)                 To develop a multi-national and multi-disciplinary cooperation framework with a concrete working plan in order to provide capacity building, monitoring equipment, and free software packages and decision support systems for developing countries, and to expand Panta Rhei as well as IAHS through establishing national committees and regional networks and increasing members in these counties.

Workshop Information

Innovative Water Resources Management under Changing Environment – Understanding Interactions and Making Balance between Humankind and Nature

This conference, the eighth in the series of IWRM conferences organized by IAHS-ICWRS, is focused on the innovative and integrated management of water resources.

Conference themes

1.            Assessment of available water resources at regional and basin scales

2.            Ecological baseflow /Environmental flow to maintain the health of rivers and lakes

3.            Spatiotemporal distribution of water resources availability

4.            Water needs for a healthy society

5.            Impact of climate change and human activities on water resources

6.            Water resources allocation and management models

7.            Interactions between water resources and ecosystem

8.            Socio-hydrology as the basis of water resources management

9.            Risk analysis for water resources systems, and

10.          Related issues

Conference Flyer 

For further information about registration, accommodation, abstract and paper submission, conference fees and programme, please visit the conference website:  http://iwrm2018.bnu.edu.cn/ 

The e-journal from IUGG is now available -1 June 2017

This informal newsletter is intended to keep IUGG Member National Committees informed about the activities of the IUGG Associations, and actions of the IUGG Secretariat. E-journals from the two most recent years are available in the news section of the IAHS website (http://iahs.info/News/IUGG-Newsletters.do ). Past issues are posted on the IUGG website (http://www.iugg.org/publications/ejournals/ ).

If you would like to subscribe for the monthly E-Journal, please contact the IUGG Secretariat

The IAHS Statistical Hydrology (StaHy) Workshop 2017 will be organised in Warsaw (Poland) on 21st-22nd September 2017.

I would like to remind you that the deadline for abstract submission is 31st May.

More information and useful details can be found at http://stahy2017.org 

Should you require any further information on the workshop, Warsaw or travel to Poland do not hesitate to contact me via e-mail ([email protected]).

I would be most grateful, if you distributed this enews among people potentially interested in STAHY.

See you soon in Warsaw.

Yours faithfully
Krzysztof Kochanek
Local Organising Committee

Selecting Measures and Designing Strategies for Integrated Flood Management.
A new guidance document has been developed to support the design of well-balanced strategies for Integrated Flood Management. “This guidance document serves as the operational link between the policy and tool papers previously published by the Associated Programme on Flood Management (APFM),” said Johannes Cullman, Director of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Climate and Water Department.
News item

The e-journal from IUGG is now available -1 May 2017

This informal newsletter is intended to keep IUGG Member National Committees informed about the activities of the IUGG Associations, and actions of the IUGG Secretariat. E-journals from the two most recent years are available in the news section of the IAHS website (http://iahs.info/News/IUGG-Newsletters.do ). Past issues are posted on the IUGG website (http://www.iugg.org/publications/ejournals/ ).

If you would like to subscribe for the monthly E-Journal, please contact the IUGG Secretariat

"Water And Development: Scientific Challenges In Addressing Societal Issues”

Dear Colleagues

Herewith an update to assist you with preparations for the IAHS 2017 Scientific Assembly in South Africa in July.

•       The programme is close to being finalised. You have already received information on the acceptance of your paper or poster. Confirmation of your presentation date and time will be sent soon.  Meanwhile, an overview of the programme is available on the conference web site at http://cwrr.ukzn.ac.za/iahs/session-programme 

•       The past few weeks have been very busy for many hydrologists with meetings such as EGU etc. taking place. Given these activities, we have taken the decision to extend the early bird registration to May 15.

•       The Boardwalk Hotel, hosting the conference, has released a number of rooms at a low rate. Please contact them directly to take advantage of this opportunity. Details are on the conference web site.

•       The assessment of the Young Water Scientists support applications is ongoing and will be finalised in the next week or so. It is too late to apply for financial support now.

•       We are planning to hold a group dinner on the beach on Thursday evening i.e. July 13. Registration and payment for the dinner will be done when you register on site in July. The international frisbee competition will precede this.

•       More detailed information on local issues, such currency, electrical sockets, cell phone coverage, sim cards, security, health care etc. will be posted on the conference web site next week.

Regards

Graham Jewitt on behalf of the LOC