Institute for Water Education (UNESCO/IHE)

UNESCO-IHE is a world-leading education and research institute running Master of Science and PhD programmes. During its 50 years of history more than 13400 professional beneficiaries from more than 80 countries have been trained at IHE in water, environment and transportation. UNESCO-IHE has been involved in the following European projects: POND-LIVE, PAISA , ECOTOOLS and Fingerponds.

UNESCO-IHE is currently involved in SWITCH Sustainable Water management Improves Tomorrow’s Cities’ Health, FLOODSITE, Delft Cluster Projects (e.g. WFD-Tools, Floods) and the Nile Basin Capacity Building Network project.

UNESCO-IHE is also member of the Global Development Learning Network (GDLN) of the WorldBank, a network of training and education centres all over the world (www.gdln.org), which provides an excellent infrastructure to deliver e-learning courses and video-conference workshops (e.g. the recently hold inter-river basin workshop on water management) within Europe and globally.

The project will essentially be implemented by:

• Dr. Ann van Griensven, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Hydroinformatics, is involved in the modelling related activities of WP2 and WP4. She will supervise a PhD research on SWAT applications for water quality modelling
• Dr. Andreja Jonoskiworks at UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education as a Senior Lecturer, is involved in the activities of WP6 and WP7. His teaching responsibilities and research expertise are in the areas of catchment and groundwater modelling, and integration of models in decision support environments.
• Dr. Wim Douven will work in WP7 on the e-learning and video-conferencing developments and has 20 years of experience in integrated assessment and evaluation approaches, bringing together system and policy analysis, in environmental and water management projects at different scales in EU and Asian regions.
• Dr. Ioana Popescu is a Senior Lecturer in hydroinformatics at UNESCO-IHE, Delft, The Netherlands. She is specialized in river and catchment modelling and decision support systems for flood risk management and will be involved in WP4 and WP6.

Role in the project:

The expertise of the UNESCO-IHE research team is in river basin modelling for management and in integration of hydrological and hydraulic models and data in decision support systems distributed over electronic networks. Particular focus is on distributed catchment modelling with SWAT, model integration using OpenMI, and development of web- and mobile phone–based decision support and impact assessment applications.

The team also has expertise in development of e-learning content in the above mentioned fields. The main role of UNESCO-IHE in this project will be in WP4 –development of catchment hydrological models, WP2 – gridification of applications, WP6 – development of prototypes of Black Sea Observation Systems for citizens and WP7 – dissemination and training, particularly through development of content for the virtual training center.