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Abstract

The 23 Unsolved Problems in Hydrology (23UPH) have been recently proposed to guide research efforts and invigorate the field. While this is a great example of community level effort to generate and consolidate important scientific questions, it is only natural that there are remaining biases regarding subfields of the discipline and non-representativeness of participants due to traveling limitations. Here, we present a practical study case of how enhanced digitization allowed our community to gather and synthesize recent research related to the 23 UPH from the Latin American perspective. This synthesis at the Latin American scale recognizes a community with shared water resources, cultures, and needs and offers to the broad international hydrological community a complementary set of unique regional processes and problems. The Latin American initiative was announced through mailing lists in August 2021, it attracted responses from several countries beyond Latin America. The first hybrid meeting in November 2021 counted with 27 in-person and 66 remote attendees. The aim was to form decentralized groups who would be able to: (1) synthesize past and current research for each of the 7 major UPH themes and (2) adapt and propose new UPH focused on Latin American peculiarities. Each subgroup had 2-4 leaders who were responsible to engage other specialists and propose virtual working session during 2022 which were later reported to the larger group. The community has finished the synthesis phase and is currently promoting a workshop to finish proposed questions from Latin America.