a project to join

RiscBal (Natural Risks and Emergencies Observatory of the Balearic Islands, UIB) is a university research group that designs, runs and maintains its own operational monitoring infrastructure. Field: catchment hydrology in Mediterranean environments – water balance, runoff generation, soil moisture, drought indicators, soil erosion and sediment connectivity – and, increasingly, coupled water–carbon–energy fluxes in water-stressed island ecosystems.
Assets: RiscBal-Control real-time IoT network (~98 stations in 2026, ≥128 by 2028; hydrometric, meteorological and soil-moisture sensors; LoRa/NB-IoT telemetry); 8 new cosmic-ray neutron sensing (CRNS) stations; 6 eddy covariance stations (CARBO-RiscBal, 2026–2028, ICOS/FLUXNET integration foreseen); PostgreSQL/PostGIS–GeoServer pipeline with OGC services and FAIR data; >10 years of monitoring in burned and abandoned terraced catchments.
Key skills: integrated water monitoring; soil moisture and drought; sediment connectivity; nature-based solutions (agricultural terraces).
Ongoing: FLOODS & DROUGHTS (EU, 2026–2030), MEDGEORISK (AEI, 2026–2030), CARBO-RiscBal (AEI); regional flood early warning service and Copernicus EMS hydrological data centre.

Topic 1. Integrated Monitoring and Assessment for Sustainable Water Management
Topic 2. Nature-Based Approaches for Resilient Water Management at Hydrological and Hydrogeological System Scale
Topic 4. Resilient Water Systems Through Systemic Change, Policy Coherence and Inclusive Governance

We seek to join a consortium as partner, able to lead a work package on monitoring and observation or on the performance assessment of nature-based solutions.
Our profile fits consortia building sensor–model–service chains (Topic 1): we bring a running monitoring network and data pipeline, not one still to be built. It also fits work on nature-based approaches at hydrological system scale (Topic 2), especially historical water-retention landscapes – terraces, dry-stone hydraulic systems and check dams – and their role in water regulation, recharge and sediment retention.
We offer the Balearic Islands as a demonstration site: small, steep, ephemeral, extensively terraced catchments under seasonal, tourism-driven demand, an early indicator of southern Europe's water-scarcity trajectory. Instrumented, access-ready catchments and a direct channel to the regional water, agriculture and digital-transformation directorates make uptake realistic within the project lifetime (Topic 4).
We welcome other Mediterranean/semi-arid groups, northern partners seeking a southern climate-analogue site, and social-science partners on island water governance.

integrated water monitoring, catchment hydrology, soil moisture, drought, sediment connectivity, nature-based solutions, agricultural terraces, mediterranean islands, eddy covariance, fair water data

-