From 28 April to 2 May, geoscientists met once again in Vienna for the General Assembly 2025 of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). This is one of the major global conferences in geosciences, with over 20,000 participants (on-site and online) this year.
Naturally, such an event is an ideal opportunity to showcase your work and for networking with the geoscientific community. Five members of ICWRGC made their way to Vienna this year to co-organize sessions and splinter meetings (discussion groups), as well as to present their work.
Members of ICWRGC at the welcome sign of EGU 2025. © Layla Hashweh.
Our data centres were represented by Dr. Matthias Zink and Dr. Moritz Heinle, who co-organized two sessions on in situ soil moisture and large hydrological datasets, as well as a splinter meeting for the ISMN community. In addition, they presented recent developments on ISMN, OUTLAST and an international collaboration towards interoperability in data exchange.
Left: Matthias Zink presenting on the OUTLAST project. Right: Moritz Heinle presenting on a project to improve interoperability in data exchange. © for both pictures Renee van Dongen-Köster.
Dr. Luna Bharati, Dr. Renee van Dongen-Köster and Dr. Layla Hashweh co-organized sessions on transboundary water cooperation and capacity development in Africa, both with corresponding splinter meetings (https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU25/session/54634 respectively https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU25/session/54507).
These sessions and splinter meetings were strongly linked to the educational programs SASSCAL and WASCAL, which ICWRGC is actively supporting. These two programmes were further introduced during the conference on a poster and in a presentation. In addition, Dr. van Dongen-Köster presented results from the URSACHEN project and Dr. Bharati gave a presentation on filling data gaps in Environments of the Himalayan Region.
Left: Renee van Dongen-Köster presenting at her PICO spot (© Moritz Heinle). LunaBharati, Renee van Dongen-Köster and Layla Hashweh at the SASSCAL/WASCAL poster (© Layla Hashweh).
Aside from these activities, the EGU conference provided an ideal platform for discussion with colleagues from partner organisations such as WASCAL, UFZ or NFDI4Earth. EGU 2026 (03.05. to 08.05.2026) will definitely be highlighted in the ICWRGC calendar for next year.
If you have further questions on the ICWRGC contributions to this year’s EGU conference, please write an email to .
