Seven Continents, One Challenge: Innovative Water Sensing; reflecting on SWIG's Global Webinar, 3 December 2025

This year’s global SWIG webinar brought together speakers and case studies from all seven continents, with a strong focus on how sensing, data and AI are reshaping urban drainage and wider water management.  

Across the day we saw how continuous monitoring is moving from isolated sites to full catchments and city-scale programmes, with low-cost sensors, solid QA/QC and clear dashboards enabling a shift from reactive maintenance to genuinely proactive, risk-based management of stormwater and combined networks. A strong theme was the move from “data for its own sake” to sensing-to-decision workflows. AI applied to CCTV footage is now detecting defects and infiltration within minutes; image-based and neural velocimetry methods are bringing us closer to real-time surface-velocity and discharge estimates; and all of this is being deployed with careful attention to uncertainty, calibration and real-world constraints.

Contaminants of emerging concern also featured prominently. New portable platforms for PFAS detection, alongside work on wastewater reuse, highlighted that traditional bacterial thresholds can miss antibiotic-resistant organisms and genes - making a strong case for including resistance parameters in standards for treated wastewater, especially where irrigation involves uncooked produce. 

Infrastructure and climate-resilience discussions drew on long-term monitoring of nature-based solutions, the transition from grey to green infrastructure, and the value of participatory approaches. We also explored smart-city innovation pipelines that co-develop and field-test new sensing systems before adoption, and saw how hardware advances (from wireless subsurface communication to radar-based discharge sensing in extreme environments) are keeping pace with progress in analytics and AI.

Globally, the picture that emerged was one of uneven but accelerating progress. In some regions, limited budgets, connectivity and technical capacity continue to constrain large-scale IoT and sensor deployment, yet there are promising initiatives that show how targeted pilots, local manufacturing, training and collaboration can unlock progress. At the same time, open-source machine-learning models for river health and water quality are lowering the barrier to advanced analytics, allowing regulators, utilities and researchers to share tools and build on one another’s work.

What tied all of this together was the clear value of interdisciplinary collaboration: ecologists working with data scientists, utilities partnering with technology developers, cities co-designing solutions with researchers, and communities being brought into the conversation about what information is actually needed to manage risk. The discussions and breakout sessions repeatedly came back to the importance of relationships, trust and shared language between disciplines if we want sensing and data to translate into better decisions on the ground.

Finally, I would like to offer a sincere thank you to everyone who made the day so productive and enjoyable: to our speakers for sharing such impressive work so openly; to my fellow chairs (Mike Strahand and Sarah Brooks) for steering the conversations; and to all the participants whose questions and comments sparked thoughtful, sometimes challenging, but always constructive discussion. I’m excited to see the new collaborations and ideas that grow out of this year’s event.

Dr Andy Nichols

The University of Sheffield

Organiser and Chair – Global SWIG Webinar 2025