ALBERT

Description: Data collection and management constitutes the foundation for all analysis and modeling tasks required for achieving water, food, energy, and environmental security. UN-Water identifies data and information as one of the five accelerators where efforts and investments should be concentrated to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6). Availability of open and free data resources can greatly contribute to enhanced implementation capacity in water research. In this context, it is crucial that data are freely accessible, openly available, and reliable. Open datasets are available online, are accessible in machine-readable formats (i.e. not pdfs or reports), and are obtainable by the public. Free refers to the availability of datasets with licenses that allow sharing at no cost to individuals, researchers, institutions, or projects. However, such datasets are dispersed across various websites and repositories. This hampers visibility and findability, which in turn results in limited use for generation of new knowledge or transferability of insights. This highlights a critical need for improving visibility of existing hydrological datasets, dedicated projects, and repositories. Crowdsourced scientific data collection efforts enable collaborative work and provide potential solutions to these issues. In this talk, we present a crowdsourced hydrology initiative aimed at establishing a global catalog of open and free datasets. This inventory will provide a database of static links, data DOIs, description of datasets along with key references and supporting information. We report on our progress and challenges in designing such an initiative with the hope that others will benefit.

Description: In this chapter, we review a variety of methods and modelling approaches employed in Panta Rhei and detail how each approach highlights different aspects, and how they can be brought together to advance a more holistic understanding of a human-water system. Change in coupled human-water systems has been studied using a wide variety of methods, before and during the Panta Rhei decade. We engage with the literature on the methods that have been developed by the Panta Rhei community over recent years while placing them in the wider context of existing research approaches for exploring change in human-water systems and settings used by other social and natural science fields. Going deeper into the methods, we present an overview of qualitative and quantitative methods, including modeling approaches, upon which we highlight the potential of mixed methods in studying human-water systems.