Today’s world is dominated by a wide range of informatics tools that are readily available to a wide range of
stakeholders. There is growing recognition that the appropriate involvement of local communities in land and
water management decisions can result in multiple environmental, economic and social benefits. Therefore,
local stakeholder groups are increasingly being asked to participate in decision making alongside policy makers,
government agencies and scientists. As such, addressing flooding issues requires new ways of engaging with the
catchment and its inhabitants at a local level. To support this, new tools and approaches are required. The growth
of cloud based technologies offers new novel ways to facilitate this process of exchange of information in earth
sciences.
The Environmental Virtual Observatory Pilot project (EVOp) is a new initiative from the UK Natural Envi-
ronment Research Council (NERC) designed to deliver proof of concept for new tools and approaches to support
the challenges as outlined above (http://www.evo-uk.org/). The long term vision of the Environmental Virtual
Observatory is to:
• Make environmental data more visible and accessible to a wide range of potential users including public good
applications;
• Provide tools to facilitate the integrated analysis of data, greater access to added knowledge and expert analysis
and visualisation of the results;
• Develop new, added-value knowledge from public and private sector data assets to help tackle environmental
challenges.
As part of the EVO pilot, an interactive cloud based tool has been developed with local stakeholders. The Local
Landscape Visualisation Tool attempts to communicate flood risk in local impacted communities. The tool has
been developed iteratively to reflect the needs, interests and capabilities of a wide range of stakeholders. This
tool (assessable via a web portal) combines numerous cloud based tools and services, local catchment datasets,
hydrological models and novel visualisation techniques. This pilot tool has been developed by engaging with
different stakeholder groups in three catchments in the UK; the Afon Dyfi (Wales), the River Tarland (Scotland)
and the River Eden (England). Stakeholders were interested in accessing live data in their catchments and looking
at different land use change scenarios on flood peaks. Visualisation tools have been created which offer access
to real time data (such as river level, rainfall and webcam images). Other tools allow land owners to use cloud
based models (example presented here uses Topmodel, a rainfall-runoff model, on a custom virtual machine image
on Amazon web services) and local datasets to explore future land use scenarios, allowing them to understand
the associated flood risk. Different ways to communicate model uncertainty are currently being investigated and
discussed with stakeholders.
In summary the pilot project has had positive feedback and has evolved into two unique parts; a web based map
tool and a model interface tool. Users can view live data from different sources, combine different data types
together (data mash-up), develop local scenarios for land use and flood risk and exploit the dynamic, elastic cloud
modelling capability. This local toolkit will reside within a wider EVO platform that will include national and
global datasets, models and state of the art cloud computer systems.