Shannon de Roos, KU Leuven:

“Currently I am working from my self-made home office. Our meetings are now all proceeding online. My research can continue without any disturbance as working with big data has the advantage of only needing great computational power.

Regarding SHui research plans, I am now in the evaluation stage of my model, concerning the simulation of biomass production and soil moisture by Aquacrop v6.1 over Europe at 1-km resolution. After this, I will have reached the first target of my research; developing a spatial version of the Aquacrop model. The next step will be Data Assimilation, which I will start with in the upcoming months.”

Gunther Carl Liebhard and WP1 Team, BOKU:

“At BOKU the time of Covid-19 restrictions is intensively used to evaluate least year’s data, e.g. lysimeter data for modelling purposes. Furthermore, time is used to populate the SHui database as well as for quality checks of uploaded data sets. Also, field studies continue mostly as planned, of course with appropriate safety measures (see image below).“

Sensor installation by BOKU team in Raasdorf, Austria

Miroslav Bauer, CVUT:

“We, the SHUI team at CVUT, leader of WP2.2, have been greatly affected by the current covid-19 situation. But luckily, we were still allowed to organize a series of experimental field campaigns. The images below show one of our biggest experimental campaigns during spring 2020 where we monitored the retention capacity of grass strips- Plots of various slopes, lengths and types of vegetation were included.

For the SHUI project, we have strengthened online communication internally as well as externally to continue our research activities. With colleagues from CSIC, BOKU, and BAW we have initiated monthly ZOOM meetings within our sub-WP2.2 – things are running smoothly, and people are working and collaborating!

We have also used our time to present some of our results (active participation at remotely organized EGU meeting) + to prepare topical manuscripts with a foreseen submission during summer 2020.”