FREEWAT at the 27th Mišič Water Day 2016

In the occasion of the 27^th Mišič Water Day 2016 (27 Mišičev vodarski dan 2016), held in Maribor last December 2016, the FREEWAT project and its Slovenian case study Vrbanski plato were successfully presented by the Institut za Ekološki Inženiring (IEI), one of the core project’s partners.

The conference, organised in collaboration with the Ministry of Environment and Spatial Planning and sponsored by the Municipality of Maribor and water and ecological companies in Slovenia, including IEI and the Water Management Company Ptuj, brought together policy makers, stakeholders, professionals and authorities involved in the water sector (management, regulation and protection of water, including groundwater).

In this light, Mrs. Irena Majcen, Minister of the Environment and Spatial Planning’s  welcome speech highlighted the current activities and initiatives running in the field of water management and how they will concretely support a better optimisation of  the  water's use and implementation of water management.

As part of the proceedings, the FREEWAT consortium submitted a paper entitled Use of free and open source GIS environment for modeling groundwater flow on case study Vrbanski plato (EU PROJECT FREEWAT, HORIZON 2020 – Vremec,M., Ravnik, J., Kopač,I., pp. 86-95): Moreover the event was a key dissemination opportunity where two project’s posters, one presenting the project overall and a second one focusing on the Vrbanski plato case study were showed and some communication material such as newsletters and project leaflet were distributed to attendees at the conference entrance. The aforementioned dissemination activities raised interest among participans mainly about the innovative, free and open FREEWAT platform and related training courses organised at national level.

Based on this one-day event’s outcome, the FREEWAT consortium considers the Mišič Water Day an opportunity also for the project’s exploitation and sustainability.