Applications of Social Media in Hydroinformatics: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews how social media data and analytical tools are increasingly used in hydroinformatics for environmental monitoring, water management, and disaster response, highlighting new models and advanced topics.

Contribution

It introduces a 4W model and methodological framework for applying social media to hydroinformatics, and provides a comprehensive overview of current research and future challenges.

Findings

Social media enhances hydroinformatics applications in water management.

New models facilitate understanding of social media's role in hydroinformatics.

Discussion of data quality, fake news, privacy, and algorithms in water-related social media use.

Abstract

Floods of research and practical applications employ social media data for a wide range of public applications, including environmental monitoring, water resource managing, disaster and emergency response.Hydroinformatics can benefit from the social media technologies with newly emerged data, techniques and analytical tools to handle large datasets, from which creative ideas and new values could be mined.This paper first proposes a 4W (What, Why, When, hoW) model and a methodological structure to better understand and represent the application of social media to hydroinformatics, then provides an overview of academic research of applying social media to hydroinformatics such as water environment, water resources, flood, drought and water Scarcity management. At last,some advanced topics and suggestions of water related social media applications from data collection, data quality management, fake news detection, privacy issues, algorithms and platforms was present to hydroinformatics managers and researchers based on previous discussion.