Editorial: Water and environmental challenges in a changing world: the perspective of the 13th International Conference on Hydroinformatics HIC 2018

The IAHR/IWA Joint Committee on Hydroinformatics is a community of scientists working on the application of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in addressing the increasingly serious problems of the equitable and efficient use of water in its various and really different forms. The community is thus composed of particularly wide and lively research areas widening from numerical modelling to the development of new sensors and tools, from the interpretation of increasing amounts of data, to the analysis and management of complex systems requiring the integration of physically based models, data and controls for practical applications. Today, multi-disciplinarity is the key to tackle challenges for sustainable management of water resources, especially considering the increasing complexity in the water world. It is thus fundamental to link the mathematical laws describing the water bodies and the new technologies given by the ICT and information science scientific communities. In this framework, the 13th International Conference on Hydroinformatics 2018 (HIC 2018) held in Palermo, Italy, was the concrete location where researchers, working in very different areas related to water problems, over an entire week.