HYDRALAB-PLUS

HYDRALAB is an advanced network of environmental hydraulic institutes in Europe, which has been effective in providing access to a suite of major and unique environmental hydraulic facilities from across the whole European scientific community.

The issues associated with climate change impacts on rivers and coasts are significant enough to ask the scientific community to which we open up our facilities to focus their research efforts on adaptations for climate change. We plan to issue themed calls for proposals for access to the facilities, with scientific merit as the main selection criterion, but with preference to the proposals that also address issues of adaptation to climate change impact.

In HYDRALAB+, with the prospect of climate change, we will build networking activities that will also involve the wider hydraulic community in the process of generating the deliverables of the project. The first Workshop in the project will be devoted to working together with the larger European hydraulics community not directly involved in HYDRALAB.

Increased emphasis will be placed by HYDRALAB+ on engagement with industry – a theme that will be delivered initially through the vehicle of a focussed Workshop between HYDRALAB researchers and industry. We will work together with industry to have HYDRALAB+ become part of the innovation cycle by bringing development to market – this is particularly relevant for the instruments we develop – to involve industry in our range of project deliverables.

Main results Network Activities:

Four out of six scheduled HYDRLAB+ Workshop Events have been completed:

– During the first event, 26-29 January 2016 in Hull, meetings were held with the facility owners and hydraulics community. The event included the JRA start-up meetings.

– The second event – 15-19 September 2016 – was organised in Gdansk. During a workshop with policy makers, there were detailed discussions on the links between research and policy making with official representatives from Romania, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands presenting regional and national experiences of managing climate change adaptation. Furthermore a workshop on re-use and exchange of data was organised.

– The third event, 15-19 May 2017, was organised by the University of Cantabria. In Santander the workshop ‘Industry & Innovation’ was organised to exchange experiences in the field of measurement technics.

– The fourth event, 22-26 January 2018, was organised by CNRS. In Grenoble the interaction between policy and research was discussed in the workshop ‘Climate Change Adaptation; Policy and Research’.

Within the framework of building a virtual HYDRALAB community a strong online presence, both through the website content and also through social media was created via Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Social media was used to generate more engagement and interaction outside the original HYDRALAB+ research community.

Main results Joint Research Activities:

JRA1, Representing Climate Change in Physical Experiments (RECIPE) by UHull

Following the completion of the critical review which was the main output of JRA1 during the first reporting period, our activities have focused on:

– Completing the protocols for representing variability and unsteadiness in flume facilities – deliverable 8.2 – which was submitted in May 2018.

– Holding and advanced workshop to discuss new approaches to scaling morphodynamics in time, which took place during the Grenoble event in January 2018. This was an important set-up forward in the preparation and discussion of the content for deliverable 8.3.

– A series of mesocosm experiments have been completed to develop protocols for measuring plant stress which will be described in in deliverable 8.4.

– Experiments have been undertaken with scaled braided rivers and vegetation as well as chemical surrogates and biofilms both to improve our understanding of how to effectively scale biology in time. This work is the fundamental input into deliverable 8.5.

Work has followed the planned schedule with no delays. A number of conference presentations have been given and the key results from the critical review have been published in a peer-reviewed journal article.

JRA2: Cross disciplinary Observations of Morphodynamics and Protective structures, Linked to Ecology and Extreme events (COMPLEX) by UPC

During the second reporting period the COMPLEX work has included:

– Improvements of the observational equipment at complex boundaries.

– Preparing hydraulic facilities for mix grain size sedimentary bodies.

– Adapting environmental facilities to incorporate vegetation and biologically actives sediment surfaces.

– Developing experimental methodologies for evaluating hard and soft engineering solutions in mobile bed experiments with a biota component.

JRA3; Facilitating the Re-use and Exchange of Experimental Data (FREE Data) by HRW

‘FREE Data’ main aims are to develop tools and protocols for the effective sharing of data that allows effective flux and exchange with numerical modelling and field case studies. The activities are to contribute to the creation of a free market in open data, which can be used, reused and redistributed by anyone (OpenDefinition.org).

During the second reporting period 5 out of 7 deliverables were submitted, comprising a data management plan, a data standards report, data repository rules and tools for hydraulic data interrogation and experimental expertise knowledge transfer.