Water is a key factor for life and for sustaining food, feed, and biomass for energy production in today’s bio-based economies but, in the coming decades, projected changes in the water cycle will be the main drivers in shaping our environment and its ecosystems. Whereas the water cycle will be strongly affected by climate change, the extent and impact on ecosystems’ functioning and services are only roughly known. Increasing hydroclimatic extreme events, such as floods and droughts, may lead to severe ecological, economic, and societal impacts. There is currently a need to establish a network of hydrological observatories in Europe that allows testing of hydrologic hypotheses. At present, we lack concerted and dedicated action in the field of hydrology neither in Europe nor worldwide for making hydrological data accessible to the research community and in designing cross-catchment experiments (Vereecken et al., 2015; Blöschl, 2017; Bogena et al., 2018; Vereecken et al., 2022).
The 8th Galileo Conference is therefore centered on the following scientific sessions and relevant content:
1) Innovative geophysical sensing methods in hydrological and critical zone research
2) Environmental monitoring and modeling with the support of UAS and satellites
3) Data assimilation, artificial intelligence, and hydrological observations
4) Using O-H stable isotopes for studying hydrological process understanding and the history of flowing waters
5) Quantifying regional hydrological change impacts
6) Big data science in hydrological researc
