Displays

This presentation discusses the issue of bridging science, policy, industry and practitioners communities as well as the citizen dimension for enhancing disaster resilience. It focuses on the development and consolidation of the Community of Users (CoU) on Secure, Safe and Resilient Societies, an exchange platform of the European Commission. The CoU is an initiative from DG Home and aims to create a platform to exchange information on research results and policy updates between policy-makers, researchers and end-users on a European, national and regional level. Its motivation lies on the fact that there is a large span of policies and research projects users, leading to fragmentation of information and lost opportunities regarding possible synergies. There is a strong need to boost awareness about research projects and policy developments. Besides, user’s needs are often insufficiently targeted and should be considered in the light of research programming. Links among scientific outputs and policy objectives are often lacking and there is a need to strengthen cooperation and dialogue among the different communities. This presentation will highlight current research programming and perspectives in Horizon Europe and policy implementation.

How to cite: Quevauviller, P.: Bridging science, policy, industry and practitioners communities and the citizen dimension for enhancing disaster resilience, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-22290, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-22290, 2020.

Flood emergencies are a cauldron of politics, media, operational agencies working hard on the ground and of course people’s lives, livelihoods, property and wellbeing put at risk by floodwaters.  Government and humanitarian agencies need to rapidly understand the gravity of a situation and their options to respond. To help them make decisions, and to ensure these decisions are based on evidence and not speculation, they often draft in advisory groups made of up experts in relevant fields. For floods this could include engineers, flood and weather forecasters, agricultural economists or land owners. For a hydrologist, being asked to advise governments in an emergency situation is scary and exciting, but also a wonderful opportunity to put your scientific expertise to use helping people. The key skill in these situations is understanding how and when to speak up. You must speak clearly, use simple language that non-scientists can understand, and you often only have a few seconds to convey your points. You may be faced with opposition, yet you must rely on your training and expertise to make rapid judgements and to point to the best evidence available.  Using real-life examples from flooding crises in the UK, Africa and elsewhere, we will see how it is possible to use scientific skill to directly help people by influencing decisions. By working with governments, emergency agencies and NGOs, scientists can help them to make best use of resources and even save lives.

How to cite: Cloke, H.: Flood emergencies and hydrological science communication, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-14173, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-14173, 2020.

Over the last 15 years, in the framework of the Italian early warning system, managed directly by the civil protection authorities, the gap between science and policy have been positively bridged with the Knowledge Centres: a national strategy, with a formal architecture that has build a dialogue between scientific community and responsibility services.
The applied research, tailored on operational user needs, has been funded and supported leading to the development of advanced applications in coupled meteo-hydrological modelling, satellite rapid damage analysis, hydraulic modelling, levees vulnerability estimation etc.
Similar interface models are being created in the European institutions (DRMKC, European Commission) or in the international expert Agencies ( Research Panel, WMO).
The general positive dialogue among science and policy, in a mutual enrichment, is presented in this paper. 

How to cite: angela, C.: science-policy interface: the italian experience, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-14093, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-14093, 2020.

Sand mining is a pressing environmental, ecological and economic problem that has now transcended national borders and regional boundaries. This ongoing challenge for rivers has been in the spotlight of policy makers but, it is yet to be locked under an adequate legislation. The presentation discusses the need for targeted legislation to ensure compliance with the spatial and volumetric limits imposed for sand mining activities, so that the conservation of water and sediment resources and the preservation of the hydro-morphological conditions of the watercourses and geo-morphology of adjacent farm lands and bank bunds can be achieved. In this regard, the analysis of existing regulations across countries is a necessity to arrive at a desirable combat cum conservation framework against the degrading dredging.

The analysis is attempted at an inter-continental level - between the European Union and India; regardless of their dimensionality within the Eurasian space and the extent of potential environmental threats on the entire population, the comparison of Indian and EU legal systems can be justified from various viewpoints. Firstly, it helps in studying the intended and implemented effects of environmental legislations within a Union of internal States (India) and a Union of Countries (EU); the underlying impact-wise distinctions between an innately centralized Domestic system and an International system with space for individuality and Sovereignty of independent States; Secondly, it helps in tracing the legislative progress and environmental reach of domestic statutes and regional agreements that stem from Constitutional mandate and International public morality respectively; Thirdly, it helps in mapping the reasons why a system with numerous sand mining legislations (like the TNMMC rules dating back to 1950s in India) and elaborate Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) guidelines has produced little impact on practical handles than the regional system with fewer soft laws (like the EU Water Framework Directive 60/EC/2000) and faint national innovations.

Since the common goal of both systems is the protection, restoration and enhancement of the health of ecologies, this comprehensive study will complement their efforts; it will stress on the science-policy interface in creating a more impactful legal regime by showcasing country-wise case studies; weighing the advantages and disadvantages of a regional system with greater space for international co-operation and a national system more dependent on internal regulation will benefit the policy makers in improvising and fail-proofing the existing standards and green practices; the consequential hydro-sedimentary and geo-morphological impacts of sand mining can only be avoided by finding the right balance through the study of different systems.

Keywords: Sand Mining, Environmental Impact Assessment, Ecology, Geomorphology, Legislative Practices, the European Union, India.

How to cite: Varadharajan, S. and Morosanu, G. A.: Existential crises of riverine eco-systems: an echoing environmental epidemic in Europe and India, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-13929, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-13929, 2020.

Over the past 20 years, river water quality in Indonesia has deteriorated enormously. Water quality deterioration continues to increase socio-economic inequality, as it are the most poor communities who live on and along the river. Women are comparatively highly impacted by failing water resources management, but their involvement in decision making processes is limited. As such, the uneven water quality related disease burden in Brantas River Basin widens the socio-economic gap between societal groups. In the Brantas region, cooperation and intention between stakeholders to tackle these issues is growing, but is fragile as well due to overlapping institutional mandates, poor status of water quality monitoring networks, and limited commitment of industries to treat their waste water streams. Currently, an Indonesian-Dutch consortium develops a project which is built on the premise that water problems of our world do not necessarily have to be only a cause of tension, but can also be a catalyst for cooperation. Cooperation is a process that needs active input from all concerned. As such, this project seeks to support a twinned learning process in which science is used to build a trusted information system for policy and decision making in Brantas river basin management. The project focuses on the close links between research processes of data gathering and monitoring and its relevance for societal and institutional actors within river basin management organizations. This twinning between policies and science aims to facilitate learning processes of basin authorities, societal stakeholders, companies and knowledge institutions, as they can profit from each other’s achievements, knowledge and experiences. One of the important issues for this new cooperative partnership is how to develop procedures and routines to monitor water quality in the Brantas river. Participatory data monitoring is among the prime requirements for sustainable river management. An additional dimension of the already challenging issue of data gathering in river management is how to deal with transdisciplinary issues in monitoring, measurements and measures, including research procedures and institutional setup.

How to cite: Ertsen, M.: Water quality policies in the Brantas River Basin, Indonesia, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-9700, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-9700, 2020.

Mediterranean agricultural systems often rely on irrigation, which can cause conflicts with domestic water demand due to limited water resources. Climate change could enhance these conflicts by bringing a drier climate, lowering water availability, while increasing irrigation demands, therefore creating a need for timely adaptation actions. However, the creation of adaptation plans requires the integration of local policy-makers and stakeholders, both to ensure that the plans are adjusted to local physical and social conditions, and to secure investment in the implementation phase. As many are not technical experts in water resources, this integration requires innovative methodologies to ensure that knowledge gained from advanced hydrological methods can be effectively transmitted for use.

These issues were addressed in the climate change adaptation plan for water resources in the Algarve region (southern Portugal), which was co-created between hydrologists and local stakeholders and policy-makers under project CLIMAAA, by using the Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways (DAAP) approach to synthetize the results from hydrological modelling of future scenarios.

Future scenarios were simulated from the present until 2100 using a hydrological model, with multiple realizations of climate scenarios RCP4.5and RCP8.5. The results show an increase in water stress conditions, mainly in the RCP8.5 scenario. Future scenarios and potential adaptation measures were discussed with the local policy-makers (regional and municipal water managers) and water users (water utilities, farmer associations). An agreed-upon set of measures was then simulated with the model to assess their effectiveness for adaptation. These results were used to design a DAAP specifically for the water sector in the Algarve.

Policy-makers were then presented with the DAPP, combined with a cost assessment, and selected the most suitable and politically reliable adaptation pathway until 2100. They did not consider socially desirable to decrease irrigation use, and showed a strong preference for measures such as promoting efficient water use and water retention landscapes, which are distributed and incremental, to measures such as wastewater recycling which require a large investment. However, they did consider desalination as a last resort despite the high investment, to be applied in case other measures fail to maintain water stress below an acceptable threshold. In the end, an adaptation plan for water resources was co-created between policy-makers and researchers which strongly reflected local desires and preferences, while ensuring that its effectiveness was assessed with the best available tools; this plan is now in in the review and implementation stage.

How to cite: Nunes, J. P., Dias, L. F., Aparício, B. A., Morais, I., Fonseca, A. L., Pastor, A. V., and Santos, F. D.: Using Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways and hydrological modelling to co-create water resource adaptation policies for climate change: a practical example for southern Portugal, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-11015, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-11015, 2020.

Increasing water scarcity and water-related disasters are key challenges of climate change that every continent is facing today. Southeast Asia and Africa where many developing countries are concentrated in are highly vulnerable to the impact of climate change. Especially, countries sharing river basins and located in coastal regions have been experiencing high levels of water stress mainly due to population growth and climate change. According to a recent UN report, it is estimated that more than five billion people could suffer from water shortages by 2050 because of increased water demand and climate change. In most cases, however, these people who live in least developed countries (LDCs), which have high population densities and high dependence on primary industry such as agriculture, forestry and fishing required for continuous water supply and efficient water management systems, have been already suffering from extreme levels of water stress but have less capacity and fewer resources to adapt or cope with this extreme condition. Therefore, in this study, impacts of climate change on the global water resources and water-related disasters were reviewed and analyzed in the context of the UN Climate Change Conference COP25, which was held in Spain from 2 to 13 December 2019 and discussed the most important and sensitive issues with regards to climate change adaptation and greenhouse gas mitigation among invited delegates and participants representing 197 countries.

Acknowledgements

This research was carried out as a part of “Development of the Global Water Atlas for responding to climate change project (grant number 20190404-001)” funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT, South Korea.

How to cite: Kim, Y.: Review and analysis of the global water issues in the context of COP25, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-1693, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-1693, 2020.

The European Union is funding research through so-called framework programmes (FPs), the financial and strategic tools to stimulate excellence, innovation, economic growth and creation of jobs across Europe. The allocated research budgets increased considerably from less than 4 billion Euro for FP1 (4 years) to 100 billion for Horizon Europe (FP9, 7 years), demonstrating the strategic importance that is being attributed to research and development for a strong and competitive Europe. The upcoming framework programme Horizon Europe will add a new level of ambition for the scientific, economic as well as societal impact of EU funding and address global challenges that affect the quality of our daily lives.

However, if societal issues that affect our everyday lives are to be addressed effectively in research and to drive the necessary innovation process in view of a better future, then the third component at the science-policy interface must be “society”. Robust data, facts and evidences represent an important input to policy making in addition to other inputs and considerations. Scientists and policy makers must therefore not only network amongst their communities and experts but also interact with the public and engage in dialogue with citizens in order to first understand what the concerns and issues are and later to explain the solutions.

The Joint Research Centre has engaged in an Art, Science and Society programme to fill this gap. Artists are invited to the JRC to co-develop projects with the scientists under a specific theme – in 2015 the topic was “Food”, in 2017 “Fairness” and in 2019 “Big Data, Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence”. The final works are exhibited during the so-called Resonances Festival.

This presentation illustrates at the example of the Resonances III installation “Weather Prediction by Numerical Process - a forecast for Europe” by artists Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway in collaboration with the co-authors, the added value of this approach. The installation is a performance inspired by the work of L.F. Richardson (1881–1953), a truly multi-disciplinary scientist, who contributed to finite difference solutions of partial differential equations, turbulent flow and diffusion, also fractals, and the cause and evolution of conflicts. He was particularly visionary in his work on designing a numerical scheme for weather forecasting. While serving as ambulance driver during WWI, he performed the calculation for a weather forecast for Europe “by hand”. Even if the result of his years of calculations resulted in a wrong forecast because the numerical solution was not stable, the methodology for numerical weather forecast was born and today’s weather forecasts follow largely the same method – just with infinite more computing power. Richardson estimated that 64000 scientists, working together in a big orchestrated calculation, would be needed to calculate the weather in real-time.

The chosen format for the art installation is a performance, ritualistically re-enacting a small part of this epic calculation, drawing the audience into a multi-faceted discussion on the relevance of Richardson’s legacy today in the times of super computing and climate change.

How to cite: Thielen-del Pozo, J., Autogena, L., Portway, J., and Pappenberger, F.: The science-policy interface – in need for "society" as a third component, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-21623, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21623, 2020.

A wide offer of climate data sources/services is currently available dealing with future climate scenarios and projections. A huge effort has been done at European scale to promote and share openly this information. However, their use is not extensive and their potential is frequently underexploited. There is usually a significant gap between the complexity of climate metadata and the users’ capability of exploiting them. Furthermore, this gap is also found between the expertise of climate data providers and the every-day operation of the different potentially interested end-users. Additionally, in some sectors users are not aware of climate service capabilities which prevent them from valuing and then demanding such services.

In this context, co-development improves and fosters climate services’ usability and uptake when compared to a traditional one-side development approach, since it best meets users’ needs and demands. However, co-development can be time-consuming for both sides and less effective than expected if an adequate communication design is missing. In this context, what methods of interaction with users have proved to better perform for advanced co-development of climate services? And, what factors have best motivated users to interact? are key questions to provide guidelines and profit from the on-going initiatives.

Three different approaches with users (mainly in the water sector) were tested: guided online surveys (anonymous users); focus groups (users known to different partners in the project); case study clients (users regularly interact with project partners). Indicators and metrics were used to evaluate and value the contribution from each group in the context of co-development of climate services that give future projections of water availability. The results of this comparison provide a conceptual framework to design and apply co-development strategies for climate services oriented to different groups within the water sector.

This work was funded by the project AQUACLEW, which is part of ERA4CS, an ERA-NET initiated by JPI Climate, and funded by FORMAS (SE), DLR (DE), BMWFW (AT), IFD (DK), MINECO (ES), ANR (FR) with co-funding by the European Commission [Grant 690462].

How to cite: Polo, M. J., Pimentel, R., Pérez-Palazón, M. J., Torralbo, P., Lorna, L., Menezes-Lomba, M., Photiadou, C., and Arheimer, B.: What methods of interaction with users have proved to better perform for advanced co-development of climate services in the water sector?, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-13594, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-13594, 2020.

Evidence-based decision making is seen as the key to sustainable water resource and catchment management. However, a major obstacle for evidence generation is the limited amount of data available from in-situ hydrometeorological monitoring. Monitoring is in decline globally, and this problem is particularly acute in high-elevation environments and in the tropics. Nevertheless, this situation also puts these environments in a promising position to study the potential of multi-source, polycentric generated information to tackle data scarcity.

Established in 2009, a bottom-up partnership of academic and non-governmental institutions pioneered participatory hydrological monitoring in the tropical Andes. Participatory approaches to environmental monitoring are becoming increasingly popular and are being promoted as a potential pathway to address long-standing data gaps. The partnership, known as the Regional Initiative for Hydrological Monitoring of Andean Ecosystems (iMHEA from its Spanish abbreviation) has instrumented a network of more than 30 headwater research catchments (< 20 km2) covering four major biomes (páramo, jalca, puna, and forest) in nine locations of the tropical Andes. Precipitation and streamflow are monitored at high frequency with the involvement of local communities, governments, and research institutions. The network is designed to characterize the impacts of changes in land use and watershed interventions on catchment hydrological response and has started delivering fundamental information to guide processes of decision making more effectively and influencing policy-making on water resources at local and national scales.

Participatory water resources monitoring can be seen a science-policy tool. Here we present the drivers and context of the process that led to the creation of iMHEA, currently one of the largest initiatives of grassroots and participatory environmental monitoring in the world, and the main challenges that lie ahead. Observational data from experimental catchments have an essential value for hydrology and water resources management that increases with time. The long-term sustainability in the monitoring will allow a deeper understanding of current uncertainties, including seasonality, natural variability, environmental changes, and extreme events such as drought and flooding.

How to cite: Ochoa-Tocachi, B., Buytaert, W., and De Bièvre, B.: Participatory water resources monitoring as a science-policy tool: a decade of experience from the Andes, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-17960, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-17960, 2020.

Despite a significant increase in attention for uptake of scientific results, the integration of emerging science in policy development and implementation remains challenging. The persistent gap between science and policy may frustrate the parties involved. For the scientists, the intended impacts of what are typically very much applied research efforts remain unattained. Those involved in policy implementation and development may perceive a lack of scientific support. This may particularly be the case in transitional countries, where the development of science may struggle to keep up with rapid societal and policy development; with several factors either impeding or facilitating the uptake of emergent scientific knowledge.

We implemented a series of participatory and action research activities to support the development and implementation of groundwater management policies in Colombia and explore barriers and enabling conditions to a functional science-policy interface. The factors that either impede or facilitate the process are examined through three case studies in different regions of the country. Although the national policies that govern groundwater resources management in these three areas are the same; the degree to which scientific knowledge is used to support policy implementation varies. Several factors are identified that influence the effectivity of the linkage, including among others; the availability of scientific knowledge; the establishing of trust relationships and positioning of institutions and stakeholders; as well as institutional readiness in supporting the policy implementation process. This comparison provides useful insight into how addressing some of the impeding factors may enrich the science-policy process.

How to cite: Werner, M., van Cauwenbergh, N., Stigter, T., Alfonso Segura, L., Betancur Vargas, T., Galvis, A., and Avila, H.: Bridging the science-policy gap in a transition-country setting: enablers and barriers, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-20350, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-20350, 2020.

Almost ten years ago, we published a paper where we raised the question whether effective communication of uncertainty in hydro-meteorological forecasts was an impossible mission (Ramos et al. Meteorol. Appl. 17: 223–235, 2010, DOI: 10.1002/met.202). We wanted to understand if the multiple ways of interpreting uncertainty, as well as the multiple users and forecasting situations affecting forecast display and confidence, could hamper probabilistic forecast communication in operational hydrological forecasting. We looked at the main general interconnections present in a typical flood forecasting and alert chain, the challenges of extracting meaningful information from probabilistic forecasts and the way ensemble forecasts were effectively used in flood warning and decision-making. At the end, we were optimistic to say that the “mission is not impossible, although the tasks to be executed might be difficult to accomplish.” Here, we discuss a follow-up question: what have we accomplished in terms of communicating uncertainty in hydrological forecasts in practice, and contributing to better inform decision-making? The impact of forecasts, in terms of, for instance, anticipation of extreme events and crisis management, depends on how good they are but also on how they are understood and used in practice. This requires connecting science, operations and decision-making through the forecasting chain. We present some experiments with role-play games and benchmarking skilful streamflow forecasts developed to better understand the way probabilistic predictions can support decisions, and discuss where successes were achieved and challenges remain.

How to cite: Ramos, M.-H. and Pappenberger, F.: Connecting science, operations and decision-making when communicating uncertainty in hydro-meteorological forecasting, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-20257, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-20257, 2020.

Complex water optimisation problems represent one of the biggest challenges of the near future due to human and climate impacts. On the one hand, stakeholders in the water supply sector require high-level knowledge of the whole water cycle process at different scales, with the aim to either assess the risk for uncertain future water availability or rely on more analytic approaches for decision making. On the other hand, scientific research produces high quality models, algorithms and schemes capable of solving the water problems, but scientists often struggle when it comes to deploy tools that deliver their research outcomes to stakeholders and decision makers that ultimately will use them. The principal goal of this project is to fill the gap between the development of innovative research methodologies and their practical usability in the real world. We present “RApp”, a web-based application written purely in R within the Shiny framework and developed in collaboration with the water supply company Romagna Acque SpA. RApp simulates and visualizes the behavior of the reservoir that sustains the drinking water supply system of the Romagna region, Italy, in order to support its optimal management. Reservoir simulations are obtained connecting, through a unique and site-specific modelling chain, the inflows from the upstream catchments, the functioning of the reservoir, the potential of the treatment plant and the water demand. The optimized monthly-based management rules were obtained off-line, through a multi-objective optimization algorithm by maximizing the water yields and, at the same time, minimizing the occurrence of water outages during drought periods. The RApp user can produce quick reports of the past and expected reservoir yields and stored volumes, in terms of either graphical or table outputs, as a function of different initial and boundary conditions provided by the users, such as the initial stored volume, the expected inflows, the adoption of optimized or user-defined management rules, the occurrence of an abrupt change in the water demand, thus, allowing stakeholders to explore the impact of different scenarios and management options. For developing the tool, a very close interaction between the research group and the stakeholders was required, and is still ongoing, in order to define and then expand the functionalities of the software that are most needed for its practical use.

How to cite: Pugliese, A., Neri, M., Brath, A., and Toth, E.: Converting scientific research into a practical tool co-designed with the stakeholders in R Shiny: a web-based application for managing the main reservoir of the drinking water supply system in the Romagna region, Italy, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-19508, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-19508, 2020.

In Spring 2019, eScience Center Netherlands and Delft University of Technology facilitated a workshop to develop a FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable – multi-application platform that hydrological experts and non-experts can use to guide their decision-making. Many hydrologists believe that there are too many models in the field. Each new research generation strives to improve current methods with increasing complexity and developing individual models to fit specific situations - and to what end? If other experts struggle to adapt a model, it’s unreasonable to expect a non-expert to gain meaningful insight to address challenges impacting a community or guide policy.

 A community-driven platform (eWatercycle) has been developed by an international multi-disciplinary team of hydrologists, research software engineers, tinkerers, science policy advisors, and more. The diverse and inclusive team membership is critical to ensure that the best possible tool is developed to address multi-faceted questions and benefit a wide-reaching community. eWatercycle incorporates many popular hydrological models (e.g., SUMMA, PCRGLOB-WB, WFLOW, and HYPE). We have incorporated the massive ERA5 climate reanalysis dataset, as well as global stream gauge data, such that users can analyze a system for any region. 

Considering the potential complexity from eWatercycle’s inclusion of several model types, the team continues to develope this model framework in close cooperation with potential end-users. We envision end-users may include a government scientist working to inform policy decisions on water management or city officials developing risk management strategies for extreme weather events. Users of eWatercycle will not be required to learn new programming languages or overcome significant technical barriers to begin using the framework. As a result, users will be able to use eWatercycle to work towards solving region-specific problems with confidence by considering the outcomes of different hydrological models and access to potential uncertainty in the available data and modeling techniques.

We will demonstrate the latest version of the eWatercycle platform, it's models, data and analyses capabilities. 

How to cite: Hut, R., Hall, C., Drost, N., and van de Giesen, N.: eWaterCycle: Fully open en transparant hydrological data and modelling platform facilitates FAIR policy making., EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-11254, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-11254, 2020.

Hydrologic research generates massive volumes of peer-reviewed literature across a plethora of evolving topics and sub-topics. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for scientists and practitioners to synthesize and leverage the full body of scientific literature. Recent advancement of computational linguistics, machine learning, including a variety of toolboxes for Natural Language Processing (NLP), help facilitate analysis of vast electronic corpuses for a multitude of objectives. Research papers published as electronic text files in different journals offer windows into trending topics and developments, and NLP allows us to extract information and insight about these trends. 

This project applies Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Topic Modeling for bibliometric analyses of all peer-reviewed articles in selected high-impact (Impact Factor > 0.9) journals in hydrology (Water Resources Research, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Journal of Hydrology,  Hydrological Processes, Advances in Water Resources, Hydrological Sciences Journal, Journal of Hydrometeorology). Topic modeling uses statistical algorithms to extract semantic information from a collection of texts and has become an emerging quantitative method to assess substantial textual data. After acquiring all the papers published in the aforementioned journals and applying multiple pre-processing routines including removing punctuations, nonsensical texts, stopwords, and tokenizing, stemming, lemmatization etc., the resultant corpus was fed to the LDA model for ‘learning’ latent intellectual topics. We achieved this using Gensim, an open-source Python library widely used for unsupervised semantic modeling with LDA. The optimal number of topics (k) and model hyperparameters were decided using coherence and perplexity values for multiple LDA models with varying k.  The resulting generated topics are interpretable based on our prior knowledge of hydrology and related sub-disciplines. Comparative topic trend, term, and document level cluster analyses based on different time periods, journals and authors were performed. These analyses revealed topics such as climate change research gaining popularity in Hydrology over the last decade. 

We aim to use these results combined with probability distribution between topics, journals and authors to create an interactive ontology map that is useful for research scientists and environmental consultants for exploring relevant literature based on topics and topic relationships. The primary objective of this work is to allow science practitioners to explore new branches and connections in the Hydrology literature, and to facilitate comprehensive and inclusive literature reviews. Second-order beneficiaries are decision and policy makers: the proposed project will provide insights into current research trends and help identify transitions and argumentative viewpoints in hydrologic research. The outcomes of this project will also serve as tools to facilitate effective science communication and aid in bridging gaps between scientists and stakeholders of their research.

How to cite: Rahman, M., Nearing, G., and Frame, J.: Hidden Stories in Hydrologic Literature: An Interactive Topic-Based Ontology, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-882, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-882, 2020.