Open Hardware in the UK Floods and Droughts Research Infrastructure (FDRI)

The UK Floods and Droughts Research Infrastructure (FDRI) is a £38 million investment from the UK Government to support transformative research and applications on flood and drought resilience. The infrastructure will consist of a combination of in-situ monitoring infrastructure, an overarching digital infrastructure to support telemetry, analytics, and data integration, and an extensive portfolio of capacity development, training and community building activities.

FDRI aims to be a state-of-the-art infrastructure that supports transformative research. This means that innovation sits at the heart of the infrastructure – both technological innovation using novel and emerging technologies, but also social innovation to explore novel arrangements for data collection, analysis, and knowledge co-production.

Open hardware provides unprecedented opportunities to support such innovation, not only as a source of new sensing and data processing technologies and setups, but also as a catalyst for engaging makers, inventors, entrepeneurs, citizen scientist and other innovation communities in FDRI.

Here we give an overview of the vision and implementation strategy of FDRI, as well as the specific opportunities for engagement, from early experimentation and prototyping to contributing to designing for cost-effectiveness, accuracy, robustness, longevity and long-term sustainability.