Objectives of the WISDOM Project
Challenges in the Mekong Delta area
The Mekong Delta in Vietnam offers natural resources for several million inhabitants.
However, a strong population increase, changing climatic conditions and regulatory
measures at the upper reaches of the Mekong lead to severe changes in the Delta.
Therefore, decision makers, planners and local authorities have to face new challenges.
Extreme flood events occur more frequently, drinking water availability is increasingly
limited, soils show signs of salinization or acidification, species and complete
habitats diminish. All these problems call for an optimized, integrated resource
management. For this purpose detailed knowledge and hydrologic,-, hydraulic-, ecologic-,
and sociologic factors must be available. Furthermore, the cooperation of national
institutes as well as national, regional and local authorities need to be strengthened.
Goal of the Project
It is the goal of WISDOM to jointly (Vietnamese and German
partners) design and implement an Information System for the Mekong Delta, containing
information from the fields of hydrology, sociology, information technology and earth
observation. The integration of such data will enable the end-user of the system to
perform analyses on very specific questions; and thus will supply the end-user with a
tool supporting regional planning activities.
Approach
The design of the system puts the focus on the constant integration of available and
newly generated data from all different disciplines. This enables user-oriented analyses
and custom designed querying to develop sustainable solutions in the field of resource
management. Possible applications of the system are:
- Monitoring of floods and droughts
- Evaluation of flood and drought risk, damage potential and actual damages
- Analyses of water quality, pollution and sediment load
- The improvement of flood prediction via remotely sensed precipitation
information
- Detailed adaptation of surface and sub-surface discharge models
- Information of landcover- and landuse changes
- Observation of settlement development, surface sealing and population
growth
A thorough integration of natural and social sciences is of utmost importance for the
development of the Water Information System, since it has to depict not only changes of
the natural sciences- or bio-physical field affecting the water household, but also
changes of socio-economic processes affecting the people living in the Mekong Delta.
A further – and the most important – base for the project’s success is the close
collaboration between Vietnamese and German scientists within the bilateral cooperation.
For later decision makers it is crucial that all information gathered within the project
will be available in an interrelated and easily accessible. Furthermore, education and
capacity building is a key to grant the usage of the information system after the
project’s end.
The WISDOM project has been triggered through a joint initiative of the Ministry of
Science and Technology (MOST) in Vietnam and the German Ministry for Education and
Research (BMBF) in Germany in August 2005. After a first initial preparation phase,
which lasted until summer 2006, the joint proposal was then submitted in July 2006.
Project work started in spring 2007 and will – at present – last until spring 2010.
The Vietnamese-German project consortium consists of eight partners on the
Vietnamese and ten partners on the German side.
In Vietnam:
In Germany:
Altogether, over 60 scientists from Germany and Vietnam and 15 PhD students from
Vietnam and Europe are working within the WISDOM project. The work of the PhD students
is coordinated by the UNU-EHS in Bonn – however, the individual PhD students are working
at different German partner organizations, such as ZEF, GFZ, INRES, etc. The overall
project is coordinated by the DFD-DLR, and on the Vietnamese side by the SIWRR. An
increased linkage between the consortium members on both sides shall be reached through
joint field campaigns, capacity building activities, annual meetings and joint
publications.
Transfer to other regions
An Information System is a software-architecture, which allows to feed in data of any
kind (remote sensing data, GIS data, digital maps, in-situ data, interpolated point
measurements etc,), to organize and maintain this data and – most important – to query
the data in a problem-oriented way. An Information System thus consist of a data entry
portal, a database in which the data is stored and organized, a visualization tool to
display the data and a query mask, which allows for sophisticated analyses with respect
to a certain question.
One example: the database contains flood masks, which were derived from remote
sensing data. Furthermore, the database contains a landcover/landuse classification of
the same region. A query that could be performed now is e.g.: How much of the
agriculturally used land has been flooded? Or: How many percent of the settled area were
affected?
Depending on data availability very complex queries can be performed, which allows
further solving of planning-relevant questions and which thus can support
decision-making. An Information system can be transferred to other regions as well with
relatively simple adaptations. Provided that the database is fed with data from another
area and that some querying algorithms are slightly modified the System can also support
planning in other regions of the world.
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