On the 3rd of July a joint workshop on the WISDOM Information System was given for the Department of Water Resources Management. Subject of the workshop were the underlying theoretical concepts of Web GIS applications such as the WISDOM Information System, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards and services and looking into more detail into the concept of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) as well as related administrative frameworks.

After 6 months of intensive preparation, the Institute for Socio-economic Development Studies of Can Tho City (CIDS), the Southern Institute for Sustainable Development (SISD) and the Center for Development Research (ZEF) carried out a survey on small-scale enterprises (SSE) development, livelihoods and water management in Can Tho City, Mekong Delta.

A series of tropical storms and heavy monsoon rains combined to make 2011 the worst flood season on the lower Mekong River in the last decade. The following images compare seasonal flooding along the Mekong River on October 16, October 23, and November 1, 2011.

On January 17, 2012 a Mexican delegation accompanied by DLR Executive Board Chairman Prof. Johann-Dietrich Wörner visited the Earth Observation Center (EOC). The director of the reorganized Mexican Space Agency, Agencia Espacial Mexicana (Aexa), Mr. Javier Mendieta, his deputy Mr. Enrique Pacheco, and Mr. Enrique Palos from the Mexican Embassy were able to obtained first-hand information about the EOC’s current work and international cooperation.

Between November 13th and November 23rd the DLR undertook a ground truthing campaign in the central Mekong Delta, covering the provinces of Can Tho, Kien Giang, An Giang, Dong Thap, Vinh Long, Soc Trang and Hau Giang. While the northern and central parts are under extensive mixed fruit tree farming (longan, banana, mango, pomelo, mandarin, custard apple) and vegetable plantations (salads, spring onion, pumpkin, cabbage, beans, etc.), the southern part and the western part are characterized by partially inundated plains for rice farmin and rice-duck cropping systems.

On 07 October 2011 the United Nations University, Institute for Environment and Human Security in collaboration with Can Tho University organized and hosted the WISDOM Expert Meeting on Vulnerability and Adaptation Scenarios for Can Tho and Tra Vinh. The meeting had three main objectives:

At Friday, September 16^th, both Nguyen Viet Dung and Nguyen Nghia Hung successfully defended their dissertations at the University of Stuttgart within the International Doctoral Program Environment Water (ENWAT). Their work was performed in and supervised by the section 5.4 Hydrology of the GFZ, the German Research Centre for Geoscience. The dissertation of Nguyen Viet Dung deals with the development and testing of a framework for automatic calibration of hydrodynamic models taking a large scale model of the whole Mekong Delta as an example.

In preparation of the Mekong Delta Capacity Building Tour and as an update on the current development of the WISDOM IS, DLR conducted together with lat/lon the second workshop in series on the administration of the WISDOM Information System from the 13th till the 14th of September 2011 in Ho Chi Minh City / Vietnam in cooperation with the Vietnam National University and the Southern Institute for Water Resources Research. The concept of virtualisation, applying Debian 6 in an virtual environment, server installation and other technical aspects were subject of the workshop.