Digital catchment observatories: A platform for engagement and knowledge exchange between catchment scientists, policy makers, and local communities

Abstract

Increasing pressures on the hydrological cycle from our changing planet have led to calls for a refocus of research in the sciences of hydrology and water resources. Opportunities for new and innovative research into these areas are being facilitated by advances in the use of cyberinfrastructure, such as the development of digital catchment observatories. This is enabling research into hydrological issues such as flooding to be approached differently. The ability to combine different sources of data, knowledge, and modeling capabilities from different groups such as scientists, policy makers, and the general public has the potential to provide novel insights into the way individual catchments respond at different temporal and spatial scales. While the potential benefits of the digital catchment observatory are large, this new way of carrying out research into hydrological sciences is likely to prove challenging on many levels. Along with the obvious technical and infrastructural challenges to this work, an important area for consideration is how to enable a digital observatory to work for a range of potential end-users, paving the way for new areas of research through developing a platform effective for engagement and knowledge exchange. Using examples from the recent local-scale hydrological exemplar in the Environmental Virtual Observatory pilot project (http://www.evo-uk.org), this commentary considers a number of issues around the communication between and engagement of different users, the use of local knowledge and uncertainty with cloud-based models, and the potential for decision support and directions for future research.

What Do Users Really Need? Participatory Development of Decision Support Tools for Environmental Management Based on Outcomes

“…From an adaptive management point of view, in which it is often desirable or even essential to share knowledge effectively amongst diverse stakeholder groups, this is problematic. Recently, digital catchment observatories have been suggested as a means to improve knowledge sharing and co-construction with stakeholders [25].…”

Toward generalized decision support systems for flood risk management

“…Following the successful implementation of early proof-of-concepts DSS developed in the water resources community, it has been proposed to adopt the digital observatory framework concept for flood risk management [5]. The digital observatory (DO) is a webbased integrated science-research-management approach for tackling water resources management problems using methodological principles of the integrated water resources management [4].…”

“…At a time of unprecedented growth in the number of large floods in many regions of the world, there is an increased recognition of the need for moving toward integrative approaches to flood-risk management whereby the flood-related processes are perceived as a whole system [2][3][4][5]. Development of decision-support systems using these approaches requires deep and wide integration of an unprecedented volume of data and information generated by surveying, monitoring with multi-domain modeling (hydro-meteorological, socioeconomic and ecological) into informatics-based systems that can in turn produce actionable knowledge for practice through multi-criteria analysis of the flood-risk management scenarios [6,7].…”

Rapid prototyping of decision‐support tools for conservation

“…We focused on web applications (in contrast to traditional desktop programs) because they function across platforms, are available to and easily accessed by a wide range of users without the need to install additional software, and are free at the point of use (e.g., Mackay et al. ; Hewitt & Macleod ; Mose et al. ).…”

“…For this reason, involving users during the development of tools is often critical for the success of a decision‐support tool (e.g., Mackay et al. ; Flacke & de Boer ; Hewitt & Macleod ).…”