The Summer School introduced scientific concepts, methods and tools for the analysis and monitoring of water and land resources in Central Asia. These methods are of great value in a framework of integrated water and land resources management.

The 2-week Summer School combined theoretical lectures and practical exercises with discussion sessions on the implementation of new methods and tools in managing water and land resources in Central Asia. The programme included an introduction to geographical-informational systems (GIS), an overview on remote sensing applications for land and water resources monitoring, an introduction to discharge measurement techniques and the analysis of hydrometeorological data sets using the statistical computation environment R.

Of particular use were two field trips, where participants gained a better understanding of the complexity of data collection for the validation of remotely-sensed information and the uncertainties related to discharge measurements. The courses were given by German and Central Asian researchers in English with support by Russian-speaking co-trainers.

The Summer School was organized in the frame of the German Water Initiative for Central Asia (“Berlin Process”), which has been launched by the German Federal Foreign Office in 2008 and is being implemented by  DKU, the GIZ Transboundary Water Management in Central Asia Programme and the CAWa project.

In the Summer School participated 23 young motivated and dedicated master and PhD students as well as junior specialists of government agencies and researchers with interest in the application of geoscientific methods in the frame of IWRM. Participants were selected based on the submitted application documents including a motivation letter. Overall 8 participants qualified for participation as winners of the national level Olympiads in “Integrated water management”, which were conducted in March 2015 by DKU and its partner Universities in three countries of Central Asia. Thus, a total of 23 participants were selected from 82 applications from the countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan. The CAWa project provided funding for travel and accommodation expenses for the accepted participants.