Marius Floriancic & Shaun Harrigan

A core mission of the Young Hydrologic Society (YHS) is to better connect early-career hydrologists right from the beginning of their careers. To date this has been done by creating an online platform and organising events at major international conferences, such as the European Geosciences Union (EGU), American Geophysical Union (AGU), and International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) events. The society was started and is maintained by a small core group of people.

Mapping spatial coverage of current YHS National Reps – let’s turn the whole map blue!

However, there are many enthusiastic early-career hydrologists doing great work within their own countries promoting early-career initiatives, and others who would like to contribute to the YHS network. As a community, we would all benefit immensely by learning from one another and sharing experiences and ideas. This might be an idea for an awesome session at a national or international conference, or by simply taking inspiration from one of the many sessions and short courses YHS has delivered in the past (e.g, How to write a scientific paper in hydrology).

We therefore launched this week an online YHS National Reps platform that allows national representatives from around the globe to interact by sharing information and experiences, as well as starting and contributing to discussions via a Google Group forum. On the National Rep platform we share guidelines and create a working space to fuel collaboration among a powerful network of fellow hydrologists.

So far there are 43 people from 37 countries from Russia to Zambia, Australia to El Salvador that have shown interest in becoming a national rep (see the current list of National Reps and the above map for spatial distribution). As of this week we connected these people via the online YHS National Rep platform and are looking forward to working with them over the coming years to further globalise hydrology.

Can we, the early-career hydrology community, turn this map blue in the next 5 years? If this ambition is to be realised, we need your help! If you’re interested in getting involved with the YHS National Reps initiative then please send us an email via younghydrologicsociety@gmail.com with ‘Becoming a National Rep’ in the subject line.

Get connected, get inspired and get involved!

About the authors: Marius is a PhD researcher at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and @shaunharrigan is a Research Associate at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) in the UK.