22 March World Water Day: VUB launches UNESCO Chair on Open Water Science and Education
The Department of Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel is establishing a Unesco chair on open water science and education. The aim is to increase and share knowledge on water and water resources through the use of open source possibilities for research and education. Among other things, the chair will develop the existing Open Water platform and set up citizen science projects by developing an Internet of Things for water applications. With partner universities in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, e-courses will be developed that will eventually be integrated into an e-Master in Water Resources Engineering.
Ann van Griensven, head of VUB’s Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering Department: “Hydrology is the study of mainly fresh water. Scientific insights in that field are very important for tackling major global challenges such as providing drinking water for all, and combating droughts and floods. With the chair, we want to explore the interfaces between science, policy and society. The idea behind open science is to make scientific information more widely accessible, i.e. open access, more reliable, via open data, and with the active involvement of all stakeholders, open to society.”
Within this definition, open science goes beyond science that is open to the research community and refers to a science that is open to all of society. The chair’s activities are part of the Unesco Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme (UNESCO-IHP) and build on the Open Water Network, supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders, the Flemish Interuniversity Council, the Research Council of VUB and the Flanders UNESCO Trustfunds (FUST).
Ann van Griensven
Ann van Griensven is professor at the Department of Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, associate professor of hydrology at the IHE-Delft Institute for Water Education and adjunct professor at Texas A&M. She has 25 years of research experience in water quality and hydrological modelling. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Environmental Modelling and Software and Journal of Hydrology and Earth System Sciences. She is part of the development team of the open-source Soil and Water Assessment Tool. She is the chair of the Belgian committee for UNESCO-IHP.