News & Comment

The health and non-health impacts of water collection and other water-related work should be monitored and considered in policies and programs to improve women’s lives.

The use of satellite technology is revolutionizing the measurement of Earth’s water.

Climate change and other human activities are modifying river water temperature globally. A more holistic understanding of river temperature dynamics in an integrated climate–land–hydrology–human framework is urgently needed for sustainable river management and adaptation strategies.

The surface water and ocean topography mission, known as SWOT tracks Earth’s surface water with unprecedented accuracy and completeness, improving our understanding of water under the changing climate. Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer is program manager of Ocean Physics, lead of Climate Variability and Change at NASA headquarters, program scientist of SWOT and co-founder of a non-profit organization for research in Earth science. In her conversation with Nature Water, she speaks about what SWOT will bring and why SWOT matters.

Academics, funders and publishers need to support interdisciplinary research processes in which social sciences are placed on an equal footing with the natural sciences and engineering.

Nature Water aims to be a venue for all research on the evolving relationship between water resources and society.

Since water is a common good, the outcome of water-related research should be accessible to everyone. Since Open Science is more than just open access research articles, journals must work with the research community to enable fully open and FAIR science

While the benefits of FAIR principles — findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable — and Open Data seem clear to most scientists, significant hurdles need to be overcome to make scientific databases useful and sustainable. The difficulties with incentivizing the community to share data, as encountered by the recently launched Open Membrane Database (OMD), can be used as a starting point to fuel the debate on the power and pitfalls of FAIR and Open Data practices.