World’s first ecological digital twin on Microsoft Azure helps Anglian Water protect river health

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Humanity is facing a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis. Water, ocean and river health will be crucial in meeting these challenges. At the same time, population growth and changing lifestyle expectations, farming and transport are placing huge demands on the global water cycle. To help meet these challenges, Anglian Water has partnered with Microsoft to create the world’s first digital twin of a chalkstream river catchment.
 

Digital twins in the water industry

The water industry is no stranger to the concept of a digital twin – a virtual, digital representation of real-world objects based on data models which can be used to gain insights into that object and its behaviour. Digital twins have been widely used in engineering and infrastructure for a number of years. 

However, making a digital twin of an ecosystem is something very new. Anglian Water hopes that by developing digital twins of river environments, it can understand, take action and better protect river health. 

Anglian Water is the largest water company in England, by geography. Each day, it serves its seven million customers with clean, safe drinking water. However, with only 14% of English rivers meeting good ecological status, Anglian Water must work actively to improve river health across the region it serves. 
 

Anglian Water innovates to protect river health

“One of the problems we have of understanding river health is that we don’t have this joined up picture in real time of what’s going on in the river,” explains Chris Gerrard, Catchment and Biodiversity Manager at Anglian Water. 
 

Carly Leonard, Head of Environmental Strategy at Anglian Water, adds, “One of the issues we face when collecting data is that data exists in many different pockets with many different organisations in lots of different formats, so we have a real problem in bringing that together and making that usable.” 
 

In a first-of-its-kind initiative, Anglian Water is working with Microsoft to create a digital twin which can bring these diverse environmental datasets together with the goal of discovering new solutions to improve river health which are less expensive, less carbon-hungry and work with the grain of nature. 
 

A very special ecosystem

To undertake this innovative initiative, a pilot project was undertaken to map a small subset of the rivers in the region. The River Stiffkey was chosen as a representative river catchment because of its relatively small area and its iconic environmental status as one of the world’s few chalkstream river environments. 
 

Chalkstreams are a very special type of river, almost unique to England. Eighty-five percent of the 200 chalkstreams in the world are in England, with many located within the Anglian Water region. A chalkstream system has pure, clear, constant water from underground chalk making it a perfect source of clean water. It is ideal for lots of wild creatures to breed and thrive, including kingfishers, brown trout, water voles, otters, buzzards and more.  
 

Developing a digital twin of the Stiffkey river catchment would bring diverse datasets from multiple sources together to provide digital cognition capabilities and bring clarity to Stiffkey’s complex system.  
 

Chris Gerrard explains, “The first phase of the project was an eight-week sprint where we worked together to understand the sorts of data that were available, to ingest it into the Microsoft Azure digital platform, and to build the first Power BI dashboards to bring diverse sets of data together.” 
 

New understanding will power improvement

The close integration of the Azure data platform and Power BI makes it possible to share the data with wider stakeholders so they can manipulate the data and access the insights provided via the digital twin. 
 

“We can look back in time to understand the history and, by bringing the data together, we can start to predict,” states Chris Gerrard. “We can drive new solutions to improve river health. We can help our operations colleagues who are managing assets on a day-to-day basis. We can do it more cheaply, more effectively and with a smaller carbon footprint.” 
 

This new understanding will help to drive investment towards solutions that work with the grain of nature, as Ed Bramham-Jones, CEO at Norfolk River Trust, explains. “It will allow us to put in a lot more nature-based solutions, such as wetlands and other restoration schemes which we can manage and monitor in the long term and which can be enjoyed by communities.”
 

Sharing learning throughout the industry

Dr Robin Price, Director of Quality and Environment at Anglian Water, is excited about the technology’s potential. He says, “We can adapt the learning to larger and even more complex river systems.” 
 

The potential of the river health ontology model has been recognised by Ofwat, the UK water regulator, with the recent allocation of a Water Innovation challenge award. It recognises that the open approach taken by the project sponsors will generate learning for the benefit of all. 
 

Chris Gerrard states, “Working with Microsoft on this hugely innovative project has been brilliant because it’s really helping us identify how we can be different in the future to deliver the river health we want to see.”