![Pter Vanrolleghem, Frank Blumensaat, Joao Leitao, Christoph Ort, Jörg Rieckermann, Andreas Scheidegger, Kris Villez][1] ## Motivation ## ---------- Traditionally, Urban Storm and Wastewater Management suffered from too little data on key variables or boundary conditions, such as variability of rainfall, current serviced population, and pollutant dynamics. In the future, say by 2030, communication services, such as GSM (cell phone network) and LORAWAN (IoT technology), in combination with autonomous energy supplies will make it economically viable to collect data from several tens to hundreds of sensors, even in remote or underground locations. In addition, novel sensors are being developed and existing sensors become inexpensive so that new variables can be measured with higher frequency and spatial resolution and possibly greater accuracy than today. Unfortunately, the urban water community has not yet fully grasped the value and implications of such information, which can new services such as community health assessment or predictive maintenance as in other industries. Therefore, our goal in this project is to address current and future challenges, and identify the opportunities and threats which arise from ubiquitous sensors. To this aim, we perform a horizon scan* to identify what is constant, what may change, and what is constantly changing in the time horizon of 10-15 years. [*Horizon Scanning is the systematic outlook to detect early signs of potentially important developments.] ## Research question ## ----------------- What are emerging topics (aspects) related to data that are not yet widely known to the water professionals but could have substantial effects on the monitoring and/or management of urban storm- and wastewater systems? ## Methods ## ------- To identify the most important topics, horizon scanning invites the concerned community to get a sense on the community’s familiarity with topics, and an evaluation of their importance, desirability and feasibility. To this end we have created a [survey][2] in which we propose 35 potentially emerging topics related to data that may not yet be widely known to water professionals but could have a substantial impact on the monitoring and/or management of urban storm- and wastewater systems in the future. For each topic we have provided a vision of how the topic may materialize by 2030. [1]: https://surveygizmolibrary.s3.amazonaws.com/library/437489/portait_banner_v1.jpg [2]: https://osf.io/v76ju/wiki/Survey/