Sep 23, 2026

NFDI4Earth at Water Research Horizon Conference 2026

impressions Water Research Horizon Conference 2026

Last week, the 16th Water Research Horizon Conference (WRHC) took place at the Erwin Schrödinger Center in Berlin, held in alignment with the DGL Annual Meeting. Our Chair of Geoinformatics participated with two contributions, hosting a session and a hands-on workshop on behalf of NFDI4Earth, linking its central services with the research data management needs of the water research community.

Jörg Seegert co-chaired the session on data-driven water research with Sami Domisch from IGB, the co-organising institution of this year's WRHC and an NFDI4Earth participant. With a keynote by Juha Oksanen (Geoportti RI) on the missing glue for a digital water data infrastructure across Europe, followed by lightning talks focusing on services and tools such as DO IT (Hannes Müller-Thomy) and an AI-driven framework for the datafication of historical source materials (Tobias Perschl), the session not only gave a glimpse of the bigger picture but also showcased concrete examples of how to implement FAIR principles in data-driven water research. The session was rounded off by two results-oriented presentations: one by TU Berlin (Boney Anna Joseph) on a data-driven framework for identifying urban diffuse hotspots in Berlin, and one by the UBA (Viola Rädle) on data quality assessment in wastewater monitoring.

Bridging theory and practice, the session was accompanied by a hands-on workshop organised by Jörg Seegert and Tom Niers. It invited participants to raise challenges from their daily research data management, including long-term storage, access to governmental data and metadata quality. That set the stage for presenting the OneStop4All (https://onestop4all.nfdi4earth.de/), one of the core services developed by NFDI4Earth, which supports Earth System Sciences researchers in both discovering data and choosing where to publish their own.

A big thank you to both associations hosting the WRHC, the Water Science Alliance (WSA) and the German Limnological Society (DGL), and especially to the local organising committee from the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.