Development of a national-scale decision support system for the water sector in Germany

The Water Resources Information System for Germany (WIS-D) project aims to significantly improve the decision-making basis for actors in water management. The target group are expert users at water suppliers, authorities or institutions of the federal or state governments as well as the institutions of public enforcement (e.g. in the allocation of water rights). The aim is to support the current water balance management as well as the adaptation to climate change.

WIS-D, startet in 2021, consists of two interacting platforms. The first platform (dialogue platform) ensures the professional exchange between practice partners and research and the co-production of knowledge. Here, in the circle of the stakeholder cooperation group with eight external institutions, the goals and steps defined in the project application were first discussed bi-laterally and, in a second step, in a workshop, and the stakeholder needs were recorded. For this purpose, information on required water balance variables, indicators and time scales was also requested. Stakeholder interest in climate-hydrology simulations was very high, e.g. for the allocation of water rights. The possibility of using the resulting data sets for WIS-D was contractually agreed. Additional stakeholder requirements, such as uncertainty information, were collected in the stakeholder process.

The requirements and functionalities of the second platform (technical platform) were also defined in a co-production process by the stakeholders and scientists. Based on this, the first experimental prototype was developed and made publicly available at https://webapp.ufz.de/wis-d/ in August 2022. As a change to the original schedule, the stakeholders prioritized, for example, the possibility of regional evaluability in the online portal, so that this functionality, planned for the third project year, has already been integrated into the technical platform today. WIS-D is on its way to providing an uniform database on water balance components for past, present and future across Germany. This can be used to assess the trustworthiness of existing data sets. In addition, WIS-D can help to fill water management related data and information gaps.

The contribution describes the stakeholder process, shows the functionalities of the technical platform, and discusses the challenges of WIS-D development.