Speaker
Description
Climate and land-use change are reshaping the relationships between hydrological processes, water quality, and biodiversity in river ecosystems. Effective adaptation requires an integrated understanding of these interactions, yet water management often relies on fragmented, localized, and sector-specific datasets, potentially leading to suboptimal decisions. In particular, hydrological and biological connectivity must be considered across spatial, temporal, and administrative boundaries.
Data describing water bodies span geospatial properties, hydrological characteristics, chemical and biological status, management actions, and remote-sensing observations. Elemental and genetic analyses of sediment cores, together with archival records, can further extend these data into the past and reveal long-term environmental change.
This project aims to integrate these diverse sources for water bodies throughout the Elbe River basin. It comprises three stages: (1) consolidating contemporary datasets and extracting historical information from administrative documents into validated, structured formats; (2) constructing a knowledge graph that connects water bodies, observations, environmental processes, and management activities; and (3) developing an accessible interaction layer for retrieving, exploring, and interpreting the resulting data and their context.
By supplementing existing water databases with evidence from sediment cores and archives, the project will establish a connected, long-term information resource. This resource is intended to support more comprehensive management decisions, facilitate cross-domain analyses, and improve predictive assessments of how river and lake ecosystems respond to environmental change.