SAINT PAUL, Minn. (CN) — The American Geophysical Union hosted its biennial water conference, WaterSciCon, in Saint Paul’s appropriately-named RiverCentre convention center this week where hydrologic and other water-centric researchers and enthusiasts from academic, government and civilian backgrounds gathered to discuss new developments in the field.
From new stormwater management systems, to the challenges of sharing data in a field where “publish or perish” reins and data formats abound, the conference provided a forum for scientists — hydrologists, data scientists, geophysicists, and more — to present their research on waterways, precipitation and all other forms of water from around the world.
The second WaterSciCon ever, subtitled “Catalyzing Collaborations,” was facilitated by the American Geophysical Union and the nonprofit Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc., a research organization funded by the National Science Foundation.
Collaboration was indeed a theme throughout the conference. The phrases “open science” and “open data” echoed through dozens of talks, reflecting what Clara Cogswell, a community support hydrologist for the consortium, called a “huge cultural shift.” Historically, she said, scientists haven’t had many incentives to share their data widely, and plenty of disincentives.
“It’s an uphill battle against entrenched cultural norms within academia to make data equitable, accessible, inclusive,” she said. Academics receive recognition chiefly from publishing papers, and making the data one collects on one’s local watershed publicly available is often inconvenient, and puts the sharer at risk of getting “scooped.”
The consortium operates its own data-sharing platform, HydroShare, on the principle that “data collected with taxpayer funds should be available to both taxpayers and fellow scientists,” as Cogswell put it.
That message seemed to have reached at least some other stewards of taxpayer funds. All over WaterSciCon, scientists from federal agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Geological Survey could be found making pitches to work with other scientists on major environmental projects.
Among those was Levi Brekke, head of research and development at the Bureau of Reclamation. Brekke spoke early on Monday on the bureau’s efforts to modernize the software used to monitor its many dams around the U.S. Currently, he said, that software is decentralized and not standardized, with each region of the bureau having developed its own system in the 1990s. Those legacy systems, Brekke said, were finally being pushed out because of cybersecurity concerns, but the overhaul offers other opportunities.
“Really, this is just an advertisement: ‘hey, we started,’” Brekke said in his talk. In an interview afterward, Brekke clarified that the “advertisement” was “more of an invitation for a dialogue.” As the bureau redevelops its software, he said, conversations with hydrologists can help find better ways to build it.
NOAA also sent representatives seeking collaborators. One pitched a project which seeks to map microplastic contamination in the world’s oceans. Another, Jason Gerlich, manages the Missouri River Basin and Pacific Northwest division of the Drought Early Warning System, a service of the National Integrated Drought Information System, itself a NOAA project. Gerlich said the Drought Early Warning System relies heavily on collaborators of all kinds to provide up-to-date and useful information on drought risk.
“Those drought early warning systems are so largely dependent upon the partnerships that we’ve built throughout the regions, and the folks that we get to work with and collaborate with on advancing drought science, that opportunities like this to be in a room with a bunch of technical experts…is invaluable,” Gerlich said.
WaterSciCon is just one of the conferences the American Geophysical Union hosts. Introduced for the first time in 2022 in Puerto Rico, the conference focuses on a broad spectrum of water-related science, but the organization’s annual meeting, slated to take place in December in Washington D.C., covers astronomy, geology and everything in between. This conference, by contrast, sought to explore the many dimensions of one expansive topic, according to Kristen Averyt, the union's executive vice president of science.
“It’s not just about water, it’s water and ecology, it’s water and people,” Averyt said. “It touches so many different parts of our lives in so many different ways that it is a really important topic for an organization like AGU to be focused on.”
“No single scientific discipline is going to get us everywhere we need to go and help us find all the solutions to the future,” she added. “We need to be working together, we need so many different people at the table, particularly with all the complex problems that we’re faced with.”
Standing before his poster on Wednesday, Utah State University PhD candidate José Castejon Villalobos presented one of those problems. National water models, he said, are currently somewhat limited in that data based on aerial photography doesn't always account for bathymetry, the terrain at the bottom of bodies of water. Without adequate measurement of that terrain, he said, it’s hard to accurately predict what will cause a given body of water to be inundated.
“We’re trying to reduce the uncertainty in those predictions,” Castejon Villalobos said. His poster proposed a method for adjusting for that missing bathymetry variable, and make those sorts of predictions more reliable. “At the end of the day, we are putting all of our efforts toward being able to mitigate the impacts of floods,” he said. “Of course, this is nature, and it’s unpredictable. But we are doing our best to reduce that uncertainty and, at the end, protect lives.”
Castejon Villalobos, who lived and taught in Ecuador before coming to the U.S. for his PhD program, said that resources like WaterSciCon were a major part of what makes science, as Averyt characterized it, an “international team sport.”
“It’s nice, you know, to create this network, to learn in this network,” he said, noting that while his study was currently limited to a few sites because of a lack of good data for other sites, it was possible that someone who had the required imaging handy of a different site could make it available as a subject of his own research. “Coming from a different country, there are a lot of things I’m not familiar with, and these types of conference get you… that background, and great insights."
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