A Catchment of Data, a Flow of Evidence

The River Aire catchment area extends from the upper reaches of Skipton and the start of the Yorkshire Dales National Park right down to Castleford, the river winding its way through vibrant cities like Bradford and Leeds along the way. Greatly affected by flooding in recent years, the River Aire catchment is also home to one of the most ambitious Natural Flood Management (NFM) activities in the UK.

Rapid advances in sensors and wireless networks such as LoRAWAN, coupled with greater awareness of collecting and sharing data, present opportunities to design NFM monitoring systems. These systems can then improve the evidence base for NFM and be used to help create a better understanding of NFM activities. This will support future invesment in catchment management. The data will be fundemental - how it is used, who will use it, and how will they understand it. It will need to be accessible to all and should comform to data standards that will allow it to be robust whilst still being suitable for public engagement.

The workshop on the 19th September at ODI Leeds is to start the process of co-creating a NFM monitoring strategy for the Aire catchment that makes it a national/international flagship for NFM monitoring. It will bring together a variety of stakeholders involved in NFM work across the Aire catchment to address the following questions:

What/where NFM is being planned/implemented?
What monitoring is already planned/being done?
What do we want to measure and why?
What information/data do we need and how to analyse/present this?
Is anyone already collecting this desired information and where?

Key dates

Weds 19 Sept 2018
9:30am - 3:30pm
First innovation working session to help set the context of NFM now and where it could go in the future
Thurs 20 & Fri 21 Sept 2018
IoTUK Challenger North event, where NFM is a challenge for SMEs to respond to.
Spring 2019 - tbc
9:30am - 3:30pm
Second innovation working session to help create the action plan for NFM and data.

Wednesday 19 September 2018 - Agenda

Timings are subject to some change on the day.

9:30 - 10:00	Welcome. Arrive. Meet, greet, and coffee.
10:00 - 10:15	Introductions Overview of the day, the project, and expectations.
10:15 - 11:00	Setting the context Talks from iCASP and the EA.
11:00 - 11:15	Tea/Coffee break
11:15 - 12:30	NFM & Monitoring - Where is it happening and what is needed? Working in groups. Adding NFM projects and monitoring projects to a digital map. Discussing what is needed in terms of NFM and monitoring.
12:30 - 13:30	LUNCH
13:30 - 14:45	The Future Discussing what needs to stop, what needs to start, and what should continue. Also a discussion about future output - how do we make the data from NFM accessible and digestible to varying audiences?
14:45 - 15:00	Tea/Coffee break
15:00 - 15:30	Wrap up

Resources

Spring 2019 (tbc) - Agenda

*Timings are subject to some change on the day*

9:30 - 10:00	Welcome. Arrive. Meet, greet, and coffee.
10:00 - 10:15	Introductions Overview of the day, the project, and expectations.
10:15 - 11:00	Recap of previous innovation session
11:00 - 11:15	Tea/Coffee break
11:15 - 12:30	TBC .
12:30 - 13:30	LUNCH
13:30 - 14:45	TBC
14:45 - 15:00	Tea/Coffee break
15:00 - 15:30	Wrap up

Resources

Partners

These workshops will be organised and facilitated by ODI Leeds, Yorkshire Integrated Catchment Solutions Programme (iCASP), and the Environment Agency, with the events sponsored by the Environment Agency in partnership with Leeds City Council through the Leeds Flood Alleviation Scheme, and water@leeds.