The Young Hydrologic Society has evolved within the last five years into an active platform for early career scientists to engage with the wider hydrological community. A variety of activities and events have helped the YHS in achieving its goals. Looking forward, we aim to build on these accomplishments and continue embracing new ideas and initiatives for connecting hydrologists all around the world. Below we shortly explain what we plan to do in the next five years of YHS:

• • Global coverage. YHS aspires to extend and diversify its reach and impact worldwide. Currently, YHS is run by a team of early career researchers mostly based in Europe and Northern America, organizing activities in science conferences such as the EGU General Assembly or the AGU Fall Meeting. Despite reaching many people via our online platforms (Website, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook), YHS has still a long way to go in strengthening its bonds with many countries, especially in the developing world. In order to expand YHS to other continents (e.g., Asia, Africa and South America), YHS facilitated a network of National Representatives and National Branches, with an online collaborative platform launched this week. There are currently 43 National Reps who we plan to better connect through this initiative. If you’re interested then please get in touch!
  • Blog. The YHS Blog (consisting of the ‘Streams of Thought’, ‘Research Hylights’ and ‘Hallway Conversations’) is well perceived and has a regular readership. We will introduce a new blog theme focusing on unexpected and negative results in hydrology. We think that reporting on negative results would greatly benefit our community in sharing knowledge, especially in regards of experimental work. Even though some hydrologists discussed the benefits of reporting on unexpected or negative results, it is still not common to publish those. We thereby plan to introduce a new blog theme in which everyone can easily share their findings from fieldwork that didn’t go as initially planned.
  • Science vs practice. YHS has a particular focus on hydrology as a science. However, in the future we intend to put more effort into bridging the gap between science and practice. The first step towards this goal was to establish a dialogue between YHS and the Climate and Water Department’s Hydrology and Water Resources Branch (HWR) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The YHS team attended a meeting with the HWR staff at the WMO Secretariat in Geneva to discuss potential ways to collaborate. Furthermore, our next ‘Meet the Expert’ session at EGU 2018 addressing this gap will hopefully foster the dialogue between science and practice communities and create awareness on the role of early career scientists in hydrological practice.

The YHS team was at the WMO Secretariat (Geneva, Switzerland) on 25 July 2017.

• Connecting with other scientific networks. YHS continuously seeks opportunities to reach to a wider audience by collaborating with other similar organisations. One example for this are the joint blog posts with HEPEX. YHS will also co-organize events for early career scientists with the Young Earth System Scientists (YESS) as part of the 8th GEWEX Science Conference in May 2018. Furthermore, YHS recently conducted a survey with other leading scientific organisations (e.g., HEPEX, YESS, AGU H3S, YHS Canada) to elucidate the role of early career scientists in different facets of geosciences. The outcome of the survey will appear on the YHS portal soon.

Last words

With numerous sessions and events during conferences, regular blog posts and large twitter and facebook communities (1500+ members), YHS has established itself as an active platform for sharing ideas and exchanging knowledge with our entire hydrologic community. However, YHS lives from the voluntary contributions of early career hydrologists. That’s where you come in! We constantly seek enthusiastic people to get involved in YHS. There are numerous ways to contribute which do not only serve the wider community but also your own career development and most importantly — it’s lots of fun! Get in touch if you want to be part of it!

Yes, it is only through regular (monthly) online meetings that YHS can do all the great stuff.

Andrea Popp, Nilay Dogulu, Harsh Beria, Shaun Harrigan, Tim van Emmerik, Marius Floriancic, Hannes Müller.