Preface “ Hydrology education in a changing world ”

J. Seibert1,2,3, S. Uhlenbrook4,5, and T. Wagener6 1Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland 2Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden 3Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 4UNESCO-IHE Institute of Water Education, P.O. Box 3015, 2601 DA Delft, the Netherlands 5Delft University of Technology, Department of Water Resources, P.O. Box 5048, 2600 GA Delft, the Netherlands 6Department of Civil Engineering, Queen’s School of Engineering, University of Bristol, 1.51 Queen’s Building, University Walk, Bristol, BS8 1TR, UK

Society is faced with a rapidly increasing risk of water insecurity due to a changing climate, growing population pressure and related increases in industrial productivity and food production.Particularly less developed countries with low levels of resilience are faced with serious direct or indirect consequences of human-caused climate and land use change as well as growing water demand and an increasing exposure of humans and their property to floods and other hydrometeorological extremes.Tasks such as the estimation of design floods, the quantification of available water resources or the assessments of the environmental status of rivers become both highly important and increasingly challenging.Adequate hydrology education is needed to address these questions, but is generally not yet available (e.g.Wagener et al., 2007).Hence, there is an increasing interest in water education at the university level and in the continuous development of water professionals.
This increasing interest is demonstrated by the wide range of contributions to this special issue of HESS on "Hydrology education in a changing world" (Fig. 1).Papers range from concrete examples of how to teach physical processes (Rodhe, 2012) to calls for integrative curricula (Blöschl et al., 2012), from natural science education (Gleeson et al., 2012) to addressing socioeconomic aspects of water (Douven et al., 2012), and from education at the secondary school level (Reinfried et al., 2012) to continued learning for practitioners (Kaspersma et al., 2012) (Fig. 2, Table 1).The large number of interesting contributions to this special issue clearly demonstrates the high motivation and interest of researchers and teachers in hydrology and water resource management in providing the best possible education and to advance the discussion on how to achieve it where it is not yet available.
Teaching hydrology, at undergraduate level, graduate level and in a life-long learning context, has always been a longstanding challenge for educators (Nash et al., 1990), and many of the problems discussed in historical papers still remain (Wagener et al., 2007).Challenging aspects include the heterogeneity of hydrologic entities such as the catchments and hillslopes we study and the diversity of the students we teach.Students entering hydrology programs come from both engineering and science backgrounds with very different educational foci and strengths as well as weaknesses.The heterogeneity of catchments and hydrological systems around the world is staggering and limits our ability to easily convey how general theories have to be tailored to local conditions.The educational system that supports the teaching of hydrology must undergo a paradigm shift away from the current practice of imparting a narrow set of basic concepts and a disciplinary set of skills to engineers and scientists with little consideration for the real needs of the area of hydrology, especially when considering the increasing impact of global and local environmental change (Wagener et al., 2010).How do we balance the need for hydrology students to have strong disciplinary skills in basic subjects (like maths, physics, soil science) (Kavetski and Clark, 2011), with field and laboratory work (Kleinhans et al., 2010;Nash et al., 1990), while also developing the higher level skills of connecting across disciplines and across places?Given the great complexity of  the water problems society faces in a changing world, the teaching of hydrology must adopt a more integrated view of the role of water in the natural and built environment around us.This expansion must increasingly include an understanding of how hydrologic conditions impact human behavior and how human behavior impacts the water environment.These issues call for the teaching of new skill sets, including the ability to read, interpret, and learn from patterns in the landscape; comparative studies to supplement place-based studies; learning through case studies; understanding the time-varying characteristics of hydrological systems, use of space for time substitutions; and the modeling of interacting processes such as human-nature interactions and feedbacks.This will inevitably require the continuing dissolution of the historical separation between science and engineering in our approach to hydrology education.Teaching methods should be rooted in the scientific and quantitative understanding of hydrologic processes, providing flexible hydrologic problem-solving skills that can evolve when new insights become available, and which can be adapted to provide solutions for new problems and to understand new phenomena.Our hydrology textbooks generally do not contain in-depth treatments of how to predict the hydrologic response after climate change, urbanization or land cover change have occurred, despite the fact that such predictions will be fundamental for future research and practical hydrological applications.So, how should we teach hydrology, considering that the methods for such prediction are subject to a current scientific debate, and where is the teaching material coming from?
This special issue represents a selection of papers that address these challenges in hydrology education.It includes both papers on general issues, such as the possible content of a hydrology curriculum and the professional competences required for the hydrologists of tomorrow, as well as concrete teaching experiences (Fig. 2, Table 1).The topics covered in this special issue can of course only be a sample of ongoing activities, but they address important issues that teachers and researchers active in water-related education regularly  face.There is much to be gained from an enhanced exchange of teaching methods, experiences and ideas, both regarding concrete teaching activities as well as regarding our general approach to hydrology education.We hope that this special issue can contribute to this advancement for the benefit of educating future hydrologists, water managers and others working with water-related issues.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Word cloud based on all abstracts of the HESS Special Issue on "Hydrology education in a changing world" (generated using Wordle TM ) Fig. 1.Word cloud based on all abstracts of the HESS Special Issue on "Hydrology education in a changing world" (generated using Wordle TM ).

Figure 2 .Fig. 2 .
Figure 2. Thematic foci of the contributions to the HESS Special Issue on "Hydrology education in a changing world"

Table 1 .
The papers included in this special issue are grouped into four different categories (for each paper the authors, titles and main message are given).
J. M. Kaspersma, G. J. Alaerts, Competence formation and post-graduate education in For work in the public water sector the three and J. H. Slinger the public water sector in Indonesia aggregate competences for technical issues, management and governance, and the meta-competence for continuous learning and innovation are particularly relevant.A T-shaped competence profile can help to organize the different competences.

Table 1 .
Continued.Field and lab experiments D. G. Kingston, Experiences of using mobile technologies and virtual Mobile technology-based field exercises and virtual W. J. Eastwood, P. I.Jones, field tours in Physical Geography: implications for field tours are especially popular with students R. Johnson, S. Marshall, hydrology education because they allow for increased interactivity and peer and D. M. Hannah learning.The development of such exercises is not trivial, because of high start up costs, the need for technical support and the continuous improvement of the exercises.A. Rodhe Physical models for classroom teaching in hydrology Many hydrological processes can be demonstrated and explained using simple physical models such as a sandbox.The use of such models in the classroom generates curiosity, provokes discussion and deepens the understanding of the fundamental hydrological processes.V. Hakoun, N. Mazzilli, Teaching groundwater dynamics: connecting Integrating lectures, classroom experiments and field S. Pistre, and H. Jourde classroom to practical and field classes work promotes active learning.This is exemplified for a course on groundwater dynamics student activities.Detailed appendices describe possible student activities.