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