The STARS4Water project recently released a report on “Next generation water resources data services“.
The project STARS4Water aims at improving the understanding of climate-change impacts on water resources availability and the vulnerabilities for ecosystems, society and economic sectors at river basin scale, providing actionable information to stakeholders. To this end, STARS4Water will develop and deliver new data services and data-driven models for better supporting the decision making on planning on actions for adaptive, resilient and sustainable management of freshwater resources. Data and in particular spatial data play an important role in the project.
One of the work packages of the project is dedicated to collecting, managing and providing access to existing datasets and to develop new datasets from existing sources. This report describes a key outcome of that work package: a set of indicators for assessing climate risks and impacts on integrated water resources systems. The indicators are developed in a three-tiered approach. The indicators from the first two tiers are completed and are described in this report. The third-tier indicators will follow from modelling activities within WP3 and WP4.
The first tier of indicators was directly derived from readily available datasets from e.g. the Copernicus Climate Data Store. The existing raster data was aggregated to the river (sub)catchments (Figure) to make it more practical and bring it a step closer to use by river basin managers. The second-tier indicators were derived by combining available global data with auxiliary data from various sources to yield new indicators that are more directly related to water resources management.
The calculation methods for all indicators, including assumptions and limitations, and the main results for the seven river basins are described in this report. All newly derived data has been uploaded to Zenodo and the metadata concerning the datasets is captured in the STARS4Water Metadata Portal. Additionally, the tier-1 indicators were published on a web-dashboard. The newly datasets were also discussed with stakeholders from the river basins. A summary of this discussion and initial feedback from stakeholders is given in this report.
More information can be found in the following STARS4Water project Deliverable:
Beckers, J., M. Grady, C. Laize and S. Szporak-Wasilewska (2025): Next generation water resources data services. Horizon Europe project STARS4Water. Deliverable D2.6.
