TrilaWatt stakeholder workshop

The Wadden Sea is world’s largest connected intertidal area with important ecological, cultural and recreational functions. The management of this unique area is done by the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark on a national level, but also through trilateral collaboration, since the natural system of the Wadden Sea does not stop at the borders. However, monitoring the quality status of the Wadden Sea, the planning and maintenance of transport infrastructure are done along sectoral and country lines. These approaches led to fragmentation of measures and polices that have made cross-border collaboration in, for example, data sharing and accessibility difficult. There are large amounts of data in the trilateral Wadden Sea Region that are not homogenized, distributed or dispersed and difficult to be reached.

Availability of quality assured and consistent data base for the Wadden Sea is one of the major current challenges. Reproducing the complex physical processes in Wadden Sea area and especially in tidal mudflat areas, such as large-scale sediment transport, depends on availability of an accurate data situation, which unfortunately now is heterogeneous, patchy and not harmonized across borders. It is important that planning, monitoring and assessment of the southern North Sea is done on a transnational basis in order to be able to describe the hydro-morphology accurately and to acquire knowledge about sources, sinks and transport paths of sediment in the Wadden Sea area as a system. This enables institutions and coastal managers to derive a sediment budget as well as to assess whether their coastal management strategies are appropriate to withstand the impacts of climate change and sea level rise.

Taking this into account, the project “Digital hydro morphological twin for the trilateral Wadden Sea area (TrilaWatt)” is funded by the BMDV in the framework of mFUND. The TrilaWatt project runs from the beginning of 2022 until the end of 2024. The main focus of this project is to compile and to process hydrological, geomorphological and sediment data from the trilateral Wadden Sea area. Furthermore, it is aimed to process and to publicly provide this data as downloadable web services.

On 16 February 2023, the TrilaWatt Stakeholder Workshop was conducted in order to present the status, the progress and the prospects of the project. Almost 80 participants attended this workshop, which came from the entire Wadden Sea Region, i.e. the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany, and represented administration, research and private economy.

For more information, please visit our website: www.trilawatt.eu or get into contact via e-mail: trilawatt@baw.de.