History

The Virtual Research Environment for Water and Terrestrial Environmental Research (V-FOR-WaTer) is a generic virtual research environment (VRE) for the joint systemic handling of data from water and environmental research. The VRE focuses on data management and direct access to analysis tools. This allows research data to be processed quickly and used for prognostic modelling. The development of this VRE is part of the sustainable data and software concept of the Baden-Württemberg Water Research Network and is central to the further development of water and environmental research in Baden-Württemberg.

V-FOR-WaTer is a big step towards the realization of the vision of a "Landesobservatorium Oberrheingraben" (LOBS) in which the universities of Baden-Württemberg and the LUBW operate their environmental monitoring networks cooperatively and scientifically coordinated. In this way, data can be used jointly to better understand e.g. the long-term effects of global change. For this purpose, V-FOR-WaTer focuses on data management and data analysis and aims at solving generic data transformation problems, using hydro-meteorological data as an example.

The first phase of the project, funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg, started on 1st July 2016 and ran until the end of May 2019. Further development is being pursued at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, currently within the framework of SmaRD-AI. Two institutes of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology are involved in V-FOR-WaTer: