The Soil Science and Soil Resources and the Urban Ecology and Biodiversity groups contributed to the 15th meeting of the Water Science Alliance this week. It was an honour to host the 60+ participants from all over Germany and invited speakers from China for discussions on sustainable urban water cycles.

Ines Mulder and Valentin Klaus chaired a session on sponge cities with keynotes from Vera Völker (Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik) and Ayça Ataç-Studt (TU Dortmund). The audience learned about current approaches to involve both public and private partners in creating cities and landscapes that are more resistant to extreme weather conditions.

Other conference sessions were hosted by colleagues from the Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology (Linda Weiss) and the Institute for Geosciences (Tobias Licha and Thomas Heinze). During the poster session, the stormwater-floodplain model from the Geography Didactics group was presented by Jacqueline Hoppenreijs, leading to a lot of enthusiast reactions.

We thank Martina Flörke, Florian Leese and the other organisers for the good collaboration and interesting discussions!