IGRAC contributes to 42nd IAH Congress in Rome

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IGRAC has been present at the 42nd IAH Congress, which was held last week in Rome, Italy. IGRAC’s Director Neno Kukuric and Researcher Nienke Ansems both gave presentations during this annual event organised by the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH). There was also a shared booth, manned by IGRAC and UNESCO-IHP.  

On Sunday, IGRAC Director Neno Kukuric was asked to give a presentation on ‘groundwater and climate from the global perspective’ during the GRAPHIC workshop. This workshop was held as part of the GRAPHIC project, which is a UNESCO-IHP initiative with the aim to improve understanding of groundwater interactions within the global hydrologic cycle and IGRAC is involved as partner. The next day, Kukuric also attended the IAH Transboundary Aquifers (TBA) Commission meeting.

Earlier this year, IGRAC carried out a project on Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) in the transboundary Merti Aquifer (IGAD MAR), shared between Kenya and Somalia. On Tuesday, IGRAC Researcher Nienke Ansems gave a poster presentation showing the methodology, results such as the MAR potential map and the main conclusions and recommendations.

On Thursday, Ansems gave a presentation on the Information Management System (IMS) for Transboundary Aquifers. This IMS allows users to store and visualize indicators, variables, thematic maps, documents and images collected. The IMS consists of modules related to transboundary projects, for example TWAP Groundwater and GGRETA. The session in which this presentation was given was convened by Neno Kukuric.

Other IGRAC related presentations

Tibor Stigter, Senior Lecturer at UNESCO-IHE, presented the Erasmus+ Joint Master Programme in Groundwater and Global Change – Impacts and Adaptation (GroundwatCH). This GroundwatCH programme is a new Erasmus Mundus programme of 24 months and the first batch of students will start this month. This Joint Master Programme is given by IST Lisbon (Portugal), UNESCO-IHE (the Netherlands) and TU Dresden (Germany) and IGRAC will contribute to the semester given by IGRAC’s in-house partner UNESCO-IHE.  

Another presentation with a link to IGRAC’s activities was given by Rudy Rossetto. As Project Leader, he presented the FREEWAT (FREE and open source tools for WATer resource management) project, which is a HORIZON 2020 project, financed by the EU Commission under the call ‘Water Innovation: Boosting its value for Europe’. The main result of this recently started project will be an open source and public domain GIS integrated modelling environment for simulation of water quantity and quality in surface water and groundwater with an integrated water management and planning module. IGRAC is involved in this project as project partner.