While the weather forecast warned citizens of the Balkan states to prepare for school closures and traffic disruptions due to the heavy snow falls, the DanubeSediment project partners met in Sofia on March 1 to discuss the organization of the workshop on sediment monitoring, scheduled for April 18 in Budapest, the current situation of data assessment or the deployment of project outputs and their capitalization.  

During their discussion on the strategic Danube Sediment Monitoring Guidance, project partners agreed that sediment should be perceived as one of the key resources supplied by the Danube, its tributaries or rivers in general. Even if the costs of managing sediment are high, these costs need to be compared to the shorter and long-term costs of doing nothing - e.g. costs occuring due to riverbed erosion, flood risk or the disappearance of ecosystems and biodiversity.

The DanubeSediment project sees itself as an important step towards a transnational sediment concept for the Danube River Basin, but also recognizes that developing a sediment concept is a complex task that needs more input, e.g. integrating the dimension of climate change, up- and down-scaling or the implementation of monitoring measures.