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BioWaWi

Biodiversity and Water management. Development of innovative action options for water management companies to conserve biodiversity and ecosystems.

Brief description

For water management companies, water catchment areas are essential components of value creation. Only functioning and sustainably developing ecosystems guarantee unpolluted raw water as a source for drinking water production. Therefore, biodiversity and ecosystem functionality must be integrated into comprehensive, sustainable, and climate-adapted operating management. The BioWaWi project aims to investigate how water management influences biodiversity, and to identify the conditions that water management must fulfill to ensure the sustainable conservation of biodiversity. Based on the results of the project, the water management company Stadtwerke Bühl will introduce an environmental management system that will also be transferable to other water supply companies.

DIALOGIK contribution

DIALOGIK is responsible for the connection and the communication between science and society. The local knowledge of the stakeholders is integrated into the project via a round table. It accompanies the planning of the scientific methods as well as the implementation of the results. This format of participatory modeling ensures close collaboration between water management modeling, ecosystem modeling and local actors.

In the Citizen Science project, citizens are invited to help with the biodiversity monitoring of the water catchment areas. Together with DIALOGIK, they conceptualize the procedure and the type of analysis they want to contribute to. It is planned that they will collect data (sound recordings and photographs) and information on biodiversity in habitats of different water regimes which are both easy to obtain and suitable for scientific evaluation. The App of Dawn Chorus (www.dawn-chorus.org), a project of BIOTOPIA – Naturkundemuseum Bayern will be used by citizen scientists to collect recordings of animal sounds.  In collaboration with MicroDoc (www.microdoc.com) the sounds will be linked with landscape typologies, using artificial intelligence. The accompanying social science research collects data on the motivation of citizens to participate in the project and on the opportunities and challenges of citizen science projects in biodiversity research.

Project partners

  • Institute for Applied Geosciences, Working Group Environmental Mineralogy & Environmental Systems Analysis (EMINSA), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT-AGW)
  • Institute for Atmospheric Environmental Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT/IMK-IfU)
  • Stadtwerke Bühl GmbH (SWB)
  • Dialogik non-profit society for communication and cooperation research GmbH
  • Institute for Landscape Ecology and Nature Conservation Bühl (ILN)
  • Joswig Ingenieure GmbH (JIG)