DriDanube partners have met on 24-25th January 2019 in Brno for the 5th project meeting

The purpose of the additional 5th project meeting was to discuss the possibilities of sustaining the DriDanube drought impact reporting networks and the newly developed tool Drought Watch (previously called Drought User service) after the project end.

During the course of implementation, the project partners have managed to establish a wide network of voluntary drought impact reporters throughout the whole Danube region. The number of registered reporters has already exceeded 1,000 and there‘s a great deal of partners‘ interactions with their national stakeholders behind such an impressive number. They have organized numerous meetings and seminars where the importance of the national reporting networks has been explained and discussed in detail.   

Reporters joining the DriDanube drought impact reporting network can mainly benefit from: i) a more accurate and quicker compensation process once drought is officially declared by the state and ii) a yield forecast, based on historical data and impacts from their reports, which they get as an exchange for their regular reporting.

The national reporters are a key success factor for complementing and validating the remote sensing data and proper functioning of the Drought Watch hence the partners at the 5th project meeting engaged in lively discussions how to support further growth of the reporting networks and also how to sustain their existence and continuous growth after the project end.

Drought Watch, its use and tunning of its functionalities has been a hot topic at the meeting. Since usefulness of the tool and its wide use by various groups of stakeholders is the aim, partners have agreed to prepare instructions for its use in their national languages to bring the tool closer to the users.

The partners are happy to note that DriDanube products, especially our regular drought impact reporting system and on-time information on drought status in the Danube region from the Drought Watch, are raising more and more interest from the state organizations and various potential users.