Innovation | Floods and Droughts Research Infrastructure

Innovation in FDRI

As a state-of-the-art, integrated research infrastructure, FDRI aims to incorporate the latest and most innovative technology for data collection, processing, and analysis. With an unprecedented set of facilities, it will enable its user community to produce transformative technological and social innovations. We have been consulting extensively with potential users on how this will work.

Novel water sampler for isotope analysis

Innovative infrastructure

Novel observational and digital technologies will be incorporated from the outset in the FDRI infrastructure.

Examples of innovative observational technologies include drones with sensors to monitor soil moisture, ground penetrating radar for soil moisture or stream bathymetry, automatic dilution flow gauging and low-cost telemetered sensors for groundwater level.

Examples of innovative digital technologies include telemetry with LoRaWAN, data cubes, workflows for drone/image data analysis and datastream integration.

An ongoing innovation taskforce will identify new innovations and prioritise them with the stakeholder community to enable continual upgrading of the infrastructure. These activities will go beyond just technical innovation to include broader social and scientific innovations such as citizen science, participatory monitoring and communities of practice.

Hand holding solar panel and circuit board

Field based innovation testbeds

Field-based innovation testbed sites on the rivers Chess, Severn and Tweed will provide unprecedented opportunities to develop, test, and benchmark new innovations. The most promising of these innovations will subsequently be incorporated within the FDRI infrastructure. For others, FDRI will work with existing innovation and incubation platforms to enable wider availability and uptake of the innovation.

Innovation community

FDRI will create a transformative innovation culture by fostering partnerships across different disciplines and backgrounds. Our community building will focus on social innovations to enable multi-disciplinary collaborations, ensure accessible and FAIR data, methods and tools, and embed innovation throughout the FDRI monitoring programmes.

Specific activities will include developing and implementing a technological innovation training programme, establishing a work programme to promote innovative ways of working, including citizen science, community engagement, research culture, multi disciplinarity and the creation of an online community of practice on technical and social innovation.

Stay informed

We are actively seeking engagement from the innovation community to support and get involved with our activities. To keep informed with opportunities to engage with FDRI innovation, sign up to our mailing list.