GWEN started with a formation workshop, in Greece at Navarino Environmental Observatory (NEO), Costa Navarino, Peloponnesos, Greece, October 20-26, 2011. The workshop was hosted by Prof. Georgia Destouni from Stockholm University, with an international group of researchers as participants (see Participants GWEN Workshop list here) that met to discuss and establish the network; now knows as GWEN.
A steering committee for this phase was decided on (see list below), and the outcomes and summary of the workshop can be found here:
Steering committee:
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Georgia Destouni (chair), Stockholm University, Sweden
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Nandita Basu, University of Iowa, USA
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Matt Cohen, University of Florida, USA
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Irena Creed, University of Western Ontario, Canada
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Antonis Koussis, National Observatory of Athens (NOA), Greece
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Steve Lyon, Stockholm University, Sweden
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Suresh Rao, Purdue University, USA
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Ype van der Velde, Utrecht University, Netherlands
The first Phase of GWEN was finalized in 2017 with the joint, multi-author paper on wetlands as nature-based solutions, which you can read here!
Graphical abstract of the paper showing a conceptual sketch of a wetlandscape. A wetlandscape consists of multiple wetlands that are hydrologically connected within an associated larger hydrological catchment than that of an individual wetland. The associated large-scale water fluxes; precipitation (P), evapotranspiration (ET), runoff (R) and groundwater (GW) flows are represented by arrows in the landscape. A wetlandscape and its associated total catchment is not a static unit but will be defined at and represent various spatial scales (exemplified by dashed lines).