Digital commons 'Digital twins of the river"

The River Digital Twins is a unifying initiative and an unprecedented achievement:  the first community open-source digital twins of a vast natural heritage (Europe's largest estuary) in the world. These are operational and replicable tools, for daily forecasting and prospecting to answer public policy questions and evaluate territorial strategies.

They aim to help complementary communities (decision-makers, users, engineers offices and scientists, IT developers) by giving them access to common tools, thus far reserved for scientists because they are too complex to use, in order to accelerate territorial resilience to the impacts of climate change. Indeed, they makes it possible without any advanced IT skills, and with a simple browser to access to a quasi-infinite calculation power to (i) carry out prospecting activities (e.g. impacts of construction of a bridge, impacts of climate change, analyze the impacts of water withdrawals and discharges into the river to anticipate water resource conflicts and regulate activities for better environmental respect...),  (ii) provides daily forecasts of several parameters as for example water quality, salinity or turbidity, anywhere in the river.

Based on Cloud computing “On demand” solution, River Digital Twins will reduce studies costs and create bridges between scientists and operational and industrial activities by accelerate the maturity of research work, i.e. by facilitating collaborative work and the cohabitation of operational models and exploratory models (PhD work) that are intended to become operational once recognized by shared governance and its community of experts. They will also provide workspaces for local authorities who can authorize external actors to carry out simulations, and above all to keep all work (models and simulation results) in their own operational workspace, even after the end of the call for tenders, in order to continue them without delay with other partners (e.g. the winner of a new public contract).

These tools are the culmination of the reflections of experts with very complementary skills and who have not until now had the opportunity to work together (hydro-sedimentary modelling, GIS experts, IT developers, Cloud experts). The involvement of end users was the key to setting the objectives to be achieved and making the best decisions to produce a first version operational since June 2023.

The governance of these "digital commons" is now to be shared to face civilizational and environmental issues. And Open source will facilitate that and replication in other territories. Indeed, we are convinced that the adaptation of territories requires without further delay the union of all actors around a collective and shared digital governance, in the service of strengthening our common sovereignty.