Interactive exploration of fluvial futures

Researchers of this project of the Water, Climate & Future Deltas hub created interactive notebooks for the exploration of the effects of terraforming measures along the Waal river.

Adapting densely populated deltas to the combined impacts of climate change and socioeconomic developments presents a major challenge for the sustainable development of these deltas in the 21st century. Decisions for the adaptations require an overview of costs and benefits and the number of stakeholders involved, which can be used in stakeholder discussions. Recently, common landscaping measures have been evaluated to compensate for changes in discharge and sea level rise. Clear trade-offs were revealed between evaluation parameters, but no single measure represented the optimal combination on all aspects.

Integral river management

This RiverScape approach is novel in that it quantifies the trade-offs that are not directly comparable. For the first time, this visualisation allows for a quantified idea of integral river management and the analysis provides a rational basis for compromises between stakeholders and optimisation of tax money spending. To enable further input from a large variety of stakeholders, this Water, Climate & Future Deltas project aimed at the creation of an interactive tool to explore the possible futures for the fluvial area in a quantitative manner.

Effect studies on river interventions

We created interactive notebooks for the exploration of the effects of terraforming measures along the Waal river in the Netherlands using Jupyter Notebooks. These notebooks allow Python scripts to be executed and enabled the integration of explanatory text, executable code, and interactive visualisation. The notebooks followed the typical workflow for effect studies on river interventions:

Intervention planning and parameterisation (side channels, floodplain lowering, groyne/minor embankment lowering, embankment relocation)
Evaluation on potential biodiversity, implementation costs, and number of land owners
Exploration of the existing database with interventions and their effects, which provides the frame with new measures.

Sustainable planning of the fluvial future

The results were presented to stakeholders at the national conference of the Netherlands Centre for River studies and the EGU general assembly. The notebooks were lauded for their interactive visualisation and free and open source software (Python and PCRaster). However, the tools do require some training, before they can be used effectively. This requires a time investment of stakeholders that would like to use the tools in their own projects. In addition, the integrating nature of the evaluation sparked a big discussion on which aspects should be added to complete the evaluation scheme. In this way, we contributed to the democratisation of science and the sustainable planning of the fluvial future.

The code repository and interactive notebooks are available at GitHub.