CAPACITY BUILDING COURSES AT NATIONAL LEVEL

FREEWAT courses at national level are currently organised and conducted throughout the project area; more than 40 courses is expected to be eventually held within the EU, its neighbouring countries Ukraine and Turkey and in Africa (South Africa, Namibia and Botswana). Each course is followed by an evaluation of the tools by participants, ensuring that the courses have achieved their targets, namely: to share the FREEWAT Consortium knowledge and to provide easier access to essential tools such as groundwater modeling (flow and transport), analysis of hydrochemical data, time-series analysis, simulation of water management on rural areas, among others. To date, more than 250 professionals have attended one of 13 local courses held in several countries, including Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Spain, South Africa, Turkey or Ukraine. The course participants are now qualified to independently use the platform in solving their water quality and quantity problems. Until the end of May, 26 local courses are scheduled in several project countries, including Romania, Germany, Czech Republic but also, USA or Austria (upcoming short course during the EGU 2017 Congress), among others. A new release of the FREEWAT platform is going to be out (version 0.4) and freely downloadable from the FREEWAT web site by the first week of April. The FREEWAT platform is showing increased potential of providing solutions to environmental water assessments, ensuring the compliance with standard regulatory guidelines. For more information about the courses schedule and how to attend to these courses, which are generally free, visit: http://www.freewat.eu/freewat-courses

Road to QGIS 3

In the last years, more Developers and Users are joining the QGIS Community. QGIS has became the standard open source GIS for public authorities, universities, research institutes, but also and especially for private companies.
QGIS is a reliable, quick and very complete GIS analysis software for all the kind of Users.
In late September 2013, the version 2.0 was released and then, a new stable version with bug fixing and feature improvements have been available to the Users every 4 month. Moreover, Long Term Releases (LTR) have been released and their maintenance has been guaranteed for about one year (until the next stable version was mature to become LTR).
At the moment, the latest stable release is 2.18 Las Palmas and the LTR release is 2.14 Essen. These will be the last 2 versions available: the QGIS community decided to move forward and begun to develop the 3 release.
This decision was made consciousness: other software which QGIS relies on (Python, Qt) are developing new versions and the old ones will not be longer maintained. For that reason, the community is developing QGIS with Python 3 and Qt 5 support. The first 3 release is scheduled on September 2017, while the first 3 LTR release on January 2018.

What are the consequences for the Users?
Once the first 3 version will be released, the support for the 2 versions will continue until the first 3 LTR release will be ready and the Users will be invited to move to QGIS3. One of the big consequences of this migration are plugins: all the plugins have to be adapted to Python 3, Qt 5 and the new QGIS 3 APIs.
QGIS 3 is already available as a development and unstable version: more and more people are refactoring the code and introducing new features. In fact, the development version is very stable and daily code contribution are added.
At the beginning, the User that will open QGIS 3 will not notice any big changes: QGIS is already well made and there are no reasons to change the interface.
However, under the hood, QGIS 3 has a brand new engine, where a lot of the old code has been rewritten making the software more reliable, quick and easy to develop.

Besides the code changes that the User will not be aware of, hundreds of new features have been introduced.
For example, QGIS 3 will have a native Task Manager that can be used to pause and reload long processes.
Another great feature is the Multi Map Support that allows to have more maps in the same session and at the same time:

Lots of new algorithms have been moved to the Processing framework, in order to include them in complex models and external Python scripts.
The printing layout system has been revised, it is quicker and more reliable even for large projects with many layers and complex symbols.
Many other improvements and enhancements have been made and several others are in progress and will be available for QGIS 3.
All the Users, Developers and people working with QGIS will find a comfortable, nice and clean framework to work with.

Matteo Ghetta ( Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa)

Pilot site Vrbanski plato, Slovenia

Geographical, morphological and geological settings
The pumping station of Vrbanski plato is the most important water source for 14 municipalites in northeast part of Slovenia and lies within the territory of Maribor, the second large city in Slovenia. Due to the HEPP dam Mariborski island and the dam in Melje, the aquifer is extremely abundant and independent of periods of drought and climate change. Its share in the public water supply system is approximately 70 %.
The high significance of the pumping station demands effective water resource management. Part of the management is a good hydrogeological information system, which is used as the basis of the controlled enrichment and active protection system of the water source Vrbanski plato. The area of the aquifer Vrbanski plato is protected by the National Decree on water protection zone of the water body of Ruše, Vrbanski plato, Limbuška Dobrava and Dravsko polje, which determines the water protection zones and water protection regime (Figure 2).
The plane area on the left and right Drava riverbank between Maribor island and Melje is composed of gravel and sand quaternary alluvium. Deposition of gravel and sand followed an era of intense lifting, in which Drava cut its deep riverbed under the foothills of hills. The riverbed was 14 m deeper than today at Maribor island.

Hydrological and hydrogeological settings
Two types of stone are important for hydrogeology: permeable Pliocene gravel and sand and impermeable tertiary marl and sandy marl, sandy stone, diageneticly agglutinated clay, and conglomerate. The permeable sandy gravel composes the Pliocene terraces on the left and right riverbank. These layers have a changing percentage of scree, which decreases the permeability. Based on geological research, the following hydraulic conductivity estimates exist: at the center of Vrbanski plato and the city, the hydraulic conductivity ranges from 6*10-3 to 9*10-3 m/s. The hydraulic conductivity is lower close to the Drava riverbed and close to the old Drava banks, where it is estimated to be 5*10-3 m/s, somewhere even 1*10-3 m/s. In the Melje area, the hydraulic conductivity is somewhat lower. According to geologic estimates, close to the Drava bank it is approximately 2,4 to 4,5*10-3 m/s and in the interior approximately 1,7 to 3,8*10-3 m/s.

Conceptual model
The groundwater flow runs along the old riverbed of Drava. The axis of the old riverbed runs from the point above the HEPP Mariborski island, and then turns under Limbuška dobrava towards Mariborski otok and the bridge on it. From there, it runs northeast through the pumping station of Vrbanski plato and continues towards southeast. At the Studenci bridge in the area of Lent, it re-intersects with the current riverbed, then runs parallel with it till the railway bridge, and then passes on the right bank of Drava.

Model results
The first objective of our case study was to establish a stationary model of the aquifer Vrbanski plato, with calibration and validation done on average yearly pumping rates during the year 2015. For the need of the first part of the project, the model was constructed in a stationary phase, with the model area divided into 50 x 50 m grid cells, where the following boundary conditions were taken into account:
RECHARGE package - precipitation with two zones,
RIVER package – infiltration of river Drava,
CHD package – hinterland groundwater flow from Pohorje,
WEL package – 4 pumping wells located on Mariborski island, 14 wells on the pumping station Vrbanski plato and 2 recharge wells in the valley of Vinarski potok.

End Users
There are three main partners and beneficiary of this case study. The first is Slovenian Environment Agency, which has for water management groundwater models for all important aquifers in Slovenia, except Vrbanski plato. The second one is the Inter-municipalities Agency for environmental protection and nature conservation Maribor, which is a local authority with the task of protecting groundwater. They coordinate between the 14 involved municipalities and carry out additional emission monitoring for the protection of groundwater as water resource in this region. Not at least beneficiary of this case study is the regional waterworks company (Mariborski vodovod), which needs information to optimize the use of artificial groundwater recharging and actively protect the existing pumping station and how to plan next steps of managed groundwater recharging.