Veness et al. (2025) User priorities for hydrological monitoring infrastructures supporting research and innovation

Identification

• Journal: Hydrology and earth system sciences
• Year: 2025
• Date: 2025-11-13
• Authors: William Veness, Alejandro Dussaillant, Gemma Coxon, Simon De Stercke, Gareth Old, Matthew Fry, J. G. Evans, Wouter Buytaert
• DOI: 10.5194/hess-29-6201-2025

Research Groups

• Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London, United Kingdom.
• UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), Wallingford, United Kingdom.
• School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, United Kingdom.

Short Summary

This study identifies end-user priorities for the UK’s new GBP 38 million Floods and Droughts Research Infrastructure (FDRI), revealing that value is maximized when infrastructures move beyond simple data provision to actively enable decentralized data collection and foster collaborative research communities.

Objective

• To establish the specific data and service requirements of potential users for a national hydrological research infrastructure and to determine how these priorities should shape the design and long-term sustainability of such investments.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: National (United Kingdom), with a systematic review of international hydrological observatories (e.g., OZCAR in France, TERENO in Germany, NGWOS in the USA).
• Temporal Scale: Ex-ante elicitation (pre-implementation) conducted between 2021 and 2024 for an infrastructure scheduled to be operational by 2029.

Methodology and Data

• Models used: Qualitative thematic analysis using inductive and abductive coding; PRISMA methodology for systematic literature review.
• Data sources: Systematic review of 44 academic and grey literature studies; semi-structured interviews with 20 senior stakeholders representing academia, government regulators, industry start-ups, and civil society.

Main Results

• Value Proposition: Users identified four primary value drivers: the development of user community networks, high-quality/long-term baseline data, dedicated testing spaces for innovation, and wider access to advanced monitoring equipment.
• Enabling Services: There is a critical demand for services that address practical barriers to data collection, specifically securing land access permissions, providing robust telemetry (LoRa/5G), and offering technical support/equipment rental.
• Digital Priorities: Users prioritize open-access platforms that aggregate federated datasets, provide real-time visualization, and utilize automated quality control (QC) while adhering to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles.
• Social Innovation: Citizen science and community co-design are viewed as essential, cost-effective strategies to expand monitoring capacity and local relevance.
• Structural Design: The study concludes that infrastructures must adopt "adaptive management cycles," using periodic user feedback to evolve services and ensure long-term operational sustainability through community-led contributions.

Contributions

• Provides the first documented ex-ante user-centered design framework for a large-scale national hydrological research infrastructure.
• Shifts the conceptual model of monitoring infrastructures from "data providers" to "community enablers," emphasizing that supporting decentralized data collection creates a multiplier effect on initial capital investments.
• Establishes a blueprint for integrating social innovation (citizen science) and cross-sector collaboration (academia-industry) into the core architecture of scientific monitoring systems.

Funding

• Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Infrastructure Fund (NE/V009303/1).
• UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (MR/V022857/1).
• UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) internal implementation support.

Citation

@article{Veness2025User,
  author = {Veness, William and Dussaillant, Alejandro and Coxon, Gemma and Stercke, Simon De and Old, Gareth and Fry, Matthew and Evans, J. G. and Buytaert, Wouter},
  title = {User priorities for hydrological monitoring infrastructures supporting research and innovation},
  journal = {Hydrology and earth system sciences},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.5194/hess-29-6201-2025},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-6201-2025}
}

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