Present

Scientific Sessions and Workshops

Overview

Scientific session proposals are submitted for review and accepted and allocated by the program committee. Approved scientific session proposals will be allocated oral, poster, or workshop by the program committee after the abstract submission process. For this meeting, workshops will be integrated into programming, not “extra” pieces adjacent to a meeting.

We envision a meeting format that tightly links traditional means for reporting the latest results, such as poster and oral sessions, with interactive elements. We want WaterSciCon to be a hands-on meeting that not only promotes collaboration but creates collaboration. Session proposals will be given strong preference if they include a hands-on, collaborative, and/or interactive component that will be scheduled as a workshop during the meeting.

Preference will also be given to workshops with a specific water/hydrology focus, vs a general education focus (machine learning with a specific water element or project vs. machine learning 101, for example). Workshops that include structured networking or community building will also be strongly considered.

Session Proposal Options

  • Option 1: Submit an explicitly “coupled” session-workshop (strongly encouraged)
  • Option 2: Submit a stand-alone workshop
  • Option 3: Submit a stand-alone session

Session Topics

To create a meeting that is inclusive of our community and their diverse interests, to catalyze new research communities, and to inspire creative and broad thinking about session proposals, we are encouraging sessions that self-identify with at least one of the following overlapping themes.

Novel and innovative measurement techniques continue to expand our understanding of all elements of the hydrologic cycle. New real-time data streams, instruments, and analytical tools catalyze new insight into the stores, fluxes, and societal implications of hydrologic science. We encourage sessions that focus on environmental measurements, dataset development and distribution, big data applications, machine learning and deep learning approaches, and the software systems that support them.

  • Workshop ideas that could make sense here include:
    • Training on new equipment/techniques
    • Synthesis efforts
    • Data management
    • Catalyze new working group
    • Remote sensing app development

Big data (e.g. remote sensing, reanalyses), AI and machine learning have the potential to help address several of the key challenges in hydrology and facilitate fine resolution applications at scale. We encourage sessions highlighting innovative usage of these techniques in supporting hydrologic science and applications.

  • Workshop ideas that could make sense here include:
    • Data management/how to extract info from a database
    • Reproducible science workflows/FAIR
    • From zero to analysis complete for your data set or synthesis project of interest
    • Data visualization
    • Open data science
    • Machine learning in hydrologic applications: best practices, tools and opportunities
    • Social media/community science  analytics in hydrologic applications

Open-source models have increased access to hydrologic modeling tools to the broader community and led to significant breakthroughs in our understanding of the hydrologic system. We invite sessions that demonstrate how open-source and shared/community models enable scientific advances in the hydrologic sciences.

  • Workshop ideas that could make sense here:
    • Model training / onboarding
    • Model intercomparison
    • From zero to model-executed for your catchment
    • Catalyze new working group
    • Open source tools to facilitate downscaling, skill assessment and model validation

Our understanding of the impacts of hydrological processes on ecosystem dynamics, structure and function and the effects of biotic processes on the hydrologic cycle continues to evolve rapidly. We encourage researchers interested in biogeochemical cycles , canopy processes, critical zone processes, landscape-scale changes, and other relevant ecosystem processes to submit session proposals.

  • Workshop ideas that could make sense here:
    • Sensors for ecohydrological observations
    • Machine learning for ecohydrological modeling

Education, training, and career development in water-related disciplines must prepare students and early career professionals for a wide range of careers in academia, governmental, nonprofit and for-profit sectors. Additionally, with the rapid evolution of technology, we must find new ways to support mid-career re-training. We encourage sessions that focus on all aspects of hydrologic training, education, and career advancement.

  • Workshop ideas that could make sense here:
    • Career development & mentoring
    • DEI training
    • Open educational material sharing (a “steal this module” fair?)
    • Remote sensing to on-ground applications
    • Non-academic careers

We encourage sessions that consider pathways for science-informed policy and policy-driven science, design and implementation of community-engaged research, innovative approaches for actionable environmental justice research, climate change and other environmental advocacy, and the science of team science in hydrology.

  • Workshop ideas that could make sense here include:
    • Best practices for working with community partners
    • How to start developing a co-production relationship
    • Field trips to investigate environmental justice issues in the area
    • Meet with researchers who have established relationships and projects with Indigenous communities in the area.

The focus of these sessions is on short-term to seasonal hydrologic forecasting to long-term hydrologic projections and the translation of forecasting and projections into useful tools for decision makers. Hydrologic forecasts, at various lead-times, are needed to mitigate impacts of hydrologic extremes, and hydrologic projections are needed to support climate adaptation planning. We encourage presentations focused on improving hydrologic forecasting at various time scales and projections, and innovative ways to communicate and incorporate inherent uncertainties into the decision making process.

  • Workshop ideas that could make sense here include:
    • Wrangling future climate projections into useful hydrology: from GCM projections to local time series
    • Robust decision-making crash course
    • Downscaling and forecast skill analysis

Here, we encourage formal (LTER, LTAR, NEON, CZCN, etc.) and less formal networks to offer sessions that bring new researchers into existing networks and catalyze the formation of new networks.

  • Workshop ideas that could make sense here include:
    • Cross-site intercomparisons
    • Introduction to the network / data / opportunities (and how to get engaged)
    • Working with analysis-ready data from existing data

Workshop Guidelines

Given the program committee’s desire to build workshops fully into meeting programming, there will likely be outreach to proposed workshops that are of a longer duration. Workshops could be scheduled before, during, and after core scientific programming. Depending on the workshops and needs, there could be costs associated with the workshop that attendees could bear (Needed software for a hands-on workshop, etc.).

Example Workshop Topics

The following are examples of “workshop types.” You probably have great ideas that we didn’t think of – we would love to hear them! Tell us what you’re envisioning, how it might work, etc. and we’ll be in touch. If you are submitting a workshop proposal, please let us know what type of workshop you intend to work through.

  • Learning Workshops - Teaching folks how to use your platform, tool, approach, etc. Largely a one-way delivery
  • Data Workshops - Bring your own data and learn how to process it
  • Modeling Workshops - Learn to use a model, get something spun-up and running by the time you leave the meeting
  • Synthesis Workshops - idea → data harvest → basis analyses (K-means clustering, PCA, etc.)
  • Working Groups - Catalyzing a GLEON-like working group
  • Industry Workshops - welcome industry sponsors
  • Discussions - a community of scholars who want to have a detailed discussion of a particular topic. An example might be a group of people who are in the hydromet space who want to have a community discussion of emerging techniques/technologies/etc.
  • Indigenous Knowledge Workshop - How to approach working with indigenous communities and incorporate indigenous knowledge into science

Restrictions and specifications

Please keep these items in mind.

  • The program committee generally will not consider:
    • Proposals that are celebratory or honorary in nature. Sessions cannot be in tribute to a specific person or contain the name of a scientist in the session title. Names can be used in the description when used in context with scientific results and focused on the person’s contribution to the field overall.
    • Proposals that are primarily advertisements of commercial products and services, or that contain the name of a specific experiment in the title or description. Opportunities to exhibit or sponsor activities at WaterSciCon24 will be available soon.
  • Conveners may submit multiple proposals, but we ask that you ensure the topics are different and across topics.
  • It is not possible to request an oral session. The program committee will assign final session formats and not all sessions will receive an oral component, but conveners may propose a poster-only session.
  • All first authors who submit an abstract to a session are subject to the abstract submission fee. The presenter must also pay the meeting registration fee.
  • The program committee may ask that similar session proposals merge to avoid duplication in the meeting’s scientific program. They may also ask conveners to revise a session proposal description. Following the proposal deadline, the scientific organizing committee will reach out to conveners to make these requests if needed.

Reminders

Before submitting, please:

Next Steps

  • If you submitted a proposal, you will be notified of acceptance or rejection in mid-November.
  • After session submissions and after abstract submissions, the program committee reserves the right to:
    • Reject or merge multiple proposals submitted by the same convener(s) on related topics or across sections,
    • Move sessions to another topic area,
    • Merge proposals on similar topics,
    • Request that conveners revise the session title and/or description. 
    • Notify conveners if sessions need to be merged or have their descriptions revised.
  • Conveners must be available in November and February to respond to any inquiries from the program committee.
  • Approved scientific sessions will be open to receive abstract submissions from mid-November 2023 through 24 January 2024.
    • Conveners are responsible for ensuring that the abstracts submitted to their session are topically appropriate and should work with the program committee if an abstract is better suited for another session or is not appropriate for the meeting.
    • Promotional resources for session conveners will be available in mid-November.
  • The final decision on your allocated session type (i.e., oral, poster, eLightning , workshop, or online only session) and schedule will be made by the program committee.
    • Conveners will be informed of their session type assignments in February. During this period, conveners can log into the abstract management site to begin abstract reviews and session scheduling (arranging the order of their abstracts).
    • Conveners will be informed of their session’s scheduled date and time when the online meeting program is released in late March.