Digital Catchment Twins (DigiCaT): to protect environmental flows in Scottish rivers

Innovations in digital technologies are enabling support of near real-time catchment scale decision making by farmers and other stakeholders. These innovations include IoT (Internet of Things) advances in low cost and low power in-situ sensors (e.g. sensing water quantity, soil moisture, and atmospheric conditions, as well as cameras); on-device analytics and machine learning; web/mobile dashboards that integrate multiple data sources to aid individual and collective decision making. The project will explore how catchment scale IoT technologies can aid near-real-time catchment water resource information that is available to all stakeholders to support improvements in the collaborative use of water resources to protect environmental flows in Scottish rivers. The scholar will work with colleagues and wider stakeholders including farmers to integrate a range of IoT and other (including satellite earth observation) data streams to understand the status of catchment water flows (including inputs and outputs, e.g. water abstractions) to protect environmental flows. The approaches developed will be scaleable and transferable to other catchments. The scholar will develop and apply analytic tools using a variety of statistical and computational approaches including network models, machine learning including Long Short-Term Memory networks and spatio-temporal statistical data fusion to provide near-real-time predictions and uncertainties on water quantity (and quality) across the river network.

Applicants are strongly advised to make an informal enquiry about the PhD to the primary supervisor well before the final submission deadline. Applicants must send a completed application form (available here: https://www.hydronationscholars.scot/apply), their Curriculum Vitae and a covering letter to the primary supervisor by the final submission deadline of 8th January.