• Research
  • Education
  • Publications and Data
  • People
  • News
  • Contact
  • Suomeksi

WDRGWDRGWDRGWDRG
Menu
  • Research
  • Education
  • Publications and Data
  • People
  • News
  • Contact
  • Suomeksi

EGU 2020 – WDRG sharing their experiences online

04.06.2020

Share this post

European Geosciences Union (EGU) annually holds a massive conference with more than 15 000 scientists attending from around the globe. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, this year most scientific conferences were cancelled or postponed, and the EGU annual meeting activities were arranged online (EGU2020 – Sharing Geoscience Online). The WDRG had altogether six presentations in the meeting. In this blog post, we briefly present some of our topics presented at the EGU meeting of 2020 and our experience of the conference.

Johannes – where should the animals graze?

After I heard the physical EGU was cancelled, my assumptions of the offering of the conference sank into bottom mud. I had already created a poster and practiced for the presentation and all I got was the display presentation. However, when the EGU week started, I realized the conference is not a total joke after all. Display/chat sessions worked well at least for the presenters who had planned some questions beforehand and the threshold to ask anything was extremely low.

Finally, I presented my first PhD article “Livestock carrying capacity: assessment of the world`s grasslands based on MODIS data products” (can be found here) in a session with around 40 participants. The discussion was lively, I got useful comments and after the session, I even received an email, where a Dr. ask whether I am interested to cooperate! So, after all the conference appeared to be pretty time-efficient way to receive feedback and get contacts without needing to travel to Vienna for a week! On the other hand, due to COVID-19 and the remote conference, I completely missed the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra…

Lauri – Co-occurrence of droughts

I had originally a poster in a drought session. I was planning to cancel the whole thing, since the live text chat session, where my poster had been moved to, did not sound worth the trouble. But in the end, we did an extended abstract for the session. We got many good questions in the session, even from esteemed drought experts. So, in hindsight, the experience was good and worth the effort!

I did not really follow other sessions during the week and there was really no networking or finding of new ideas. I really hope after the corona we get back to more “normal” concept. However, on the other hand this really showed the potential of remote conferences. I believe a large proportion of conferences could be arranged like this, and maybe cut the physical traveling to minimum.

Our extended abstract about “quantifying the co-occurrence of hydrological, meteorological and agricultural droughts on a global scale”, can be found here.

Picture from the AirBnB-crib we had booked for the whole group.

 

Matias – Investigating climate impacts on global agriculture

For me, it was a good experience to attend the EGU meeting this year, although, it doesn’t even nearly have the same feeling as traveling on premise and spending a week listening to presentations and discussing with fellow scientists. Usually one will easily attend tens of sessions during the conference, but this year I attended only a few sessions outside the one I presented in.

My own session was a text-based chat, which worked better than expected, as the threshold to ask questions was perhaps slightly lower than normal. My presentation titled ‘The relationship between extreme weather and low crop yields’ can be found here. Hopefully, next year we’ll be able to travel to Vienna and experience the EGU magic on site.

Amy – Resilience for whom?

Like the others, I was quite disappointed to not have a road trip to Vienna for this conference, though their ability to hold it all online definitely raises some important questions around how often we researchers really need to travel for events like this – and how much we can reduce our carbon emissions by doing more online. It was a little overwhelming to navigate all the sessions and I missed the networking opportunities, but my session at least went smoothly (‘Climate Extremes, Tipping Dynamics, and Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene’).

I was originally meant to have an oral presentation, and since my session also included a Zoom call (at one point, with over 200 people), I was still able to share my slides and talk a bit. I gave a short presentation titled: “Resilience for whom? Governing social-ecological transformation in Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake”. I showed a framework we have been developing to study resilience and governance in dynamic social-ecological systems, with some brief analysis of the Tonle Sap Lake. This topic is particularly relevant in regions such as the Mekong, where pressures such as climate change, hydropower and changing demographics are mounting. Our aim with this study is to look at resilience critically and incorporate social dimensions more fully (such as politics, power and agency). I had some positive feedback from others in the session, and overall enjoyed the experience (though I would have preferred to be with the team in Vienna)!

 

Some Austrian beers, that we planned on drinking

Alex – Flood severity along the Usumacinta River, Mexico

As an initial venture into the world of virtual conferencing, I think the EGU ‘Sharing Geoscience Online’ made a lot of progress, and laid groundwork that will be adapted in the future to enhance traditional style conferences. However, despite some innovative solutions to difficult circumstances, this year’s EGU fell a long way short of my previous experiences, and not just for the lack of Austrian beer.

Attending the EGU conference has always brought new discoveries, unexpected highlights, chance meetings, and lively debate about subjects I had never even considered before. But that wasn’t possible with this new format, as it required any participant to have pre-examined the content of presentations before discussions, which limited the scope of my involvement to a few topics I’m currently working on. I felt that this was the case for most people who took part in these text-based chat sessions, where each of the 60 or so members who were present dutifully waited their turn to ask a question of the one presentation they were interested in, before once again remaining mute.

When presenting our work in the session entitled ‘Forest and tropical hydrology’ (which can still be found here), I received a couple of insightful questions that were useful to think about, but most questions were rather simple, and I felt they were asked mostly out of politeness to fill the growing online silence.

Overall, I think the legacy of this online experiment will be more valuable in the long term than the benefits derived from this year’s conference.

Marko – Combining local and global models to improve streamflow estimates

As with likely everyone who has planned to attend EGU, I felt very disappointed for the cancellation of physical meeting and having the activities online only. The text-based chat sessions gave me some flashbacks to early 2000’s chats and I had high expectations.

When the conference finally started, I attended some interesting sessions which were arranged, but I felt that they were not really working. There was too short time for each display (just a few minutes in some of the busiest sessions), and it was clearly important to have looked at the display materials beforehand. This requires a completely different approach to attending a conference. In the physical EGU, you could just pop in an interesting session without preparing ahead and enjoy the presentations. Perhaps analogous to the chat sessions in a physical context would be a poster session, where the author is present only a few minutes, and you move from poster to poster in a huge group.

That said, my own presentation session was on Friday, and by that time the conveners had already amassed enough experience with the chats that the sessions were much better arranged. In my session, displays were brought in the conversation in groups, and thus the time per group was enough to glance through the more interesting displays. The discussion was livelier as well, since the attendees had more time for ad-hoc questions (as opposed to questions prepared ahead of the session).

All in all, I would rate the first all-online EGU at 4/5, considering the highly experimental nature of this year’s event. Would do it again.

Concluding remarks

To sum up, we think that EGU made a nice effort bringing the EGU on-line and brought a possibility to share and interact virtually in this socially distancing time. They also managed to do it in impressively short time. The live chat sessions were ok and provided a platform for discussion. However, a zoom-type of presentation with slides was seen as much better. It also provided more of the human interaction lost to the lockdowns.

We all think that there is huge potential in arranging more academic interaction and networking online, but we definitely also need physical events with traveling. So hopefully we see EGU back on more traditional format next year.

 

 

Tweet

Related Post

APRIL 24, 2025

Data-driven water and...

Sina Masoumzadeh Sayyar  When was the last time...

10

DECEMBER 9, 2024

What My PhD Taught Me &...

Johannes Piipponen With over 95% of my PhD...

30

NOVEMBER 28, 2024

To protect or to...

Daniel Chrisendo The efforts to protect women...

70
Here you can read blogs, research highlights, newsletters and other news from Water and Development Research Group.

Newsletters

 
  • WDRG Newsletter 1/2025
  • WDRG Newsletter 3/2024
  • WDRG Newsletter 2/2024
  • WDRG Newsletter 1/2024
Newsletter Archive →

News Archive

  • April 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • May 2024
  • November 2023
  • September 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • November 2022
  • August 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • June 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • September 2018
  • July 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • October 2017

Contact info

Aalto University

Water & Development Research Group
Aalto University
P.O.Box 15200
FIN-00076 Aalto
Finland

Aalto University is a multidisciplinary university, where science and art meet technology and business. We are committed to identifying and solving grand societal challenges and building an innovative future.

© Water and Development Research Group. Aalto University School of Engineering

Recent news

  • Data-driven water and wastewater networks asset management; an achievable goal or mere fantasy? April 24, 2025
  • What My PhD Taught Me & The Pros and Cons of Efficiency December 9, 2024
  • To protect or to discriminate? Women’s participation in dirty, hard, and dangerous jobs November 28, 2024
  • Enhancing Electricity Access in Rural Lesotho May 21, 2024
  • Unravelling the challenge of data scarcity in Flood Risk Mapping November 3, 2023

Twitter feed

Tweets by AaltoWAT

© 2020 WDRG, All Rights Reserved.