DAFNI Newsletter, February 2026

Introduction

I am delighted to announce Professor Jim Hall as the first of our keynote speakers for this year’s DAFNI Annual Conference. Chair of the DAFNI Strategy Board, Jim is Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks at the University of Oxford. He is internationally recognised for his research on risk analysis and decision making under uncertainty for water resource systems, flood and coastal risk management, infrastructure systems and adaptation to climate change.

Save the 10th September 2026 for this year’s conference, being held at Rhodes House in Oxford. Our theme this year will be ‘Climate and Security Resilience’ with a dual focus on the government’s Industrial Strategy and the Clean Energy Mission. Bookings now open!

Thank you to all those who applied for the DAFNI Fellowship. The deadline has now closed and we are busy checking through the applications. This is an exciting new opportunity here at DAFNI and we look forward to announcing our Fellows next month.

Congratulations to three DAFNI projects who have had papers published this year: IMPACT, RIWS and SCQUAIR. Read more below.

This month members of our team attended the CROSSEU Annual Meeting in Bucharest and we are very excited to have all CROSSEU use cases from this EU-funded project tackling the urgent challenges of climate change being represented on the DAFNI platform. A full update on the progress of this fantastic collaboration is included below.

Finally, our sold out in-person workshop at the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC), Croatia about using the DAFNI platform to best curate data was a great success last week! This was a wonderful opportunity to share information and discuss DAFNI with conference attendees. If you would like further information, please get in touch at info@dafni.ac.uk.

Dr Brian Matthews, DAFNI Programme Lead

News from our central team

The MARS team (Modelling Aviation Resilience Scenarios for the UK Aviation System) developed a computational model of the 34 biggest airports in the UK, plus an algorithm to simulate diversion options and highlight potential bottlenecks in the aviation system.

Dr Fabian Steinmann, Lecturer in Organizational Resilience and Change at Cranfield University, explains,“MARS is a unique piece of work that could support the scenario planning of mass diversion events in the UK aviation network.”
The MARS work has been very topical in terms of airport closures over the past years, and continues to be so. It is acting as a central and innovative tool around which the industry can have a targeted discussion about mitigation
strategies; it supports and simulates airline and airport contingency plans.

Click to download or read the full case study

The MARS project brings together experts in security and resilience with those from computational engineering.

Led by Principal Investigator: Dr Fabian Steinmann, the cross-disciplinary project includes CoInvestigator Dr Irene Moulitsas, Reader in Scientific Computing, and Researcher Dr Desmond Bisandu, Assistant Professor & Lead, Apprentice Open Cohort in Digital Technologies, MK:U (formerly Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow in AI and Scientific Computing at Cranfield University).

Join us at the 2026 DAFNI Conference

10th September 2026 at Rhodes House in Oxford

We would be delighted to welcome you. This year we are focusing on Climate and Security Resilience and focusing on the Government’s Industrial Strategy, specificallyClean Energy.

We will be collaborating with academic and industry partners and will be announcing more information soon!

Pre-registrations are open now.

User liaison news

This February, members of the DAFNI team joined colleagues from across Europe for the CROSSEU annual meeting. During the meeting, progress across all aspects of the project was reviewed, and planning for the final year of the project was carried out. The ultimate goal of CROSSEU is to provide essential tools for the future development of scientifically driven policy and decision making, focussed particularly on mitigation and adaptation strategies for climate change in Europe.

Tom Kirkham (DAFNI Scientific Lead) and Teagan Zoldoske (Digital Curation Officer), from DAFNI, gave progress updates on UKRI’s work on CROSSEU, and Server Kasap (DevOps Engineer) gave an overview and demonstration of the Decision Support System (DSS) which together with the Integrated Assessment Framework (IAF) will form the basis for policy analysis and recommendations.

Server provided a live demonstration of the system’s functionality and deployment on the DAFNI platform. The demonstration illustrated the process for accessing DAFNI accounts, distinguishing between basic and expert accounts, and showcased how the DSS, built using the ‘Teal’ visualisation tool from WEMC, is instantiated on DAFNI. He emphasised the crucial role of the expert account for case study partners to upload and manage data, which is then transformed into a database file compatible with the Teal tool for visualisation.

The running DSS instance shown was customised for Case Study 1, focused on public health outcomes and mortality rates due to extremes of heat and cold in the Czech Republic. This successful deployment validates the technical integration work of Work Package 3 and marks a foundational step toward rolling out the DSS for all case studies. It demonstrated versatility and usefulness of the DSS, and Teal viewer,
for presenting results, information and data to future users of the CROSSEU platform.

Find out more about the CROSSEU project at CROSSEU – Advancing climate resilience, and Teal, which underpins the CROSSEU DSS, at Teal – WEMC.

Members of the DAFNI team ran an in-person workshop at the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) in Croatia this month.

Teagan Zoldoske (Digital Curation Officer), Kyle Stevenson (User Liaison) and Elizabeth Mamchits (Software Engineer) showed how DAFNI curates data to optimise the re-use of data and computational models for research purposes.

The workshop focused on discussing the metadata behind the resource and looked at what elements are required and why. There was a lot of good discussion with the participants, many of whom were curators themselves, about DAFNI’s current curation practices and what we have planned for the future.

The session also demonstrated the DAFNI platform with examples from DAFNI’s experience of curating data and models in the UK Climate Adaptation community and with partners across Europe as part of the CROSSEU project. The workshop was well received and endorsed the approach being adopted in the DAFNI project and we look forward to taking the feedback we received onboard.

Partnership news

The DAFNI team recently presented the DAFNI platform to the Coast-R Network

A combination of different projects, including the Coast-R Network+, work collaboratively with academics, agencies, industry, local authorities, the voluntary sector and communities most affected by coastal change. The network looks to build knowledge, action and resilience for UK coastal communities and seas.

You can find more information and join the network through its webpage Homepage – Coast R Network

DAFNI platform features and updates

This month the DAFNI platform development team have started work on a new way of creating public collections of assets, looking to make project outputs and results more findable on the platform. Once complete, we anticipate
introducing a new catalogue of collections that will allow our users to display project logos/icons, as well as linking to any publications associated with the projects. Progress is also continuing on our updated web application, where this month we have been focusing on updating and improving our workflow building process.

DAFNI researchers’ news

Congratulations to researchers from three DAFNI projects who have had papers published this year!

IMPACT: IMproving flood-disruPted road networks resilience with dynAmic
people-Centric digital Twins. Lin, X., Chen, L., Lu, Q., Zhao, P., & Cheng, T. (2026). Revealing higher-order interactions through multimodal irreversibility in flood affected transportation networks. Reliability Engineering
& System Safety, 266, 111726. DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2025.111726

SCQUAIR: Simulating the Resilience of Transport Infrastructures using QUANT. Milton, R., Batty, M., Liu, X. et al. (2026) Generating millions of
transport scenarios from a large scale digital twin. EPJ Data Sci. (2026).https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-026-00625-6

RIWS: Resilience scenarios for integrated water systems. Liu, Leyang, Pianosi, Francesca, and Mijic, Ana. (2026). A benchmarking framework for refining decision-making under deep uncertainty approaches to improve planning cost efficiency. Journal of Cleaner Production. https://doi.org/10.101
6/j.jclepro.2026.147850

Government news

The government has published a progress update on the National Data Library progress update, January 2026 – GOV.UK. The update gives an overview of the five funded kickstarter projects, to help identify ways of bringing value from public sector data. It goes on to reiterate the opportunities presented by the public sector and lists other initiatives operating within this area. No clear picture has yet emerged of how the library will be delivered or how the majority of the budget is yet to be
spent, but a new update is promised for Spring 2026.

Watch our past webinars

View recordings of past webinars at https://www.dafni.ac.uk/news-events/events/webinars/

DAFNI YouTube channel: catch up on conferences and interviews

Visit https://www.youtube.com/@dafnifacility118

Community news

Newcastle University’s Urban Observatory has recently undergone a full refurbishment
Professor of Data Science at Newcastle and member of DAFNI’s Strategy Board, Phil James, is keen to connect with researchers, practitioners, and other potential users to understand what data products would be most valuable to you, whether raw data, geotiffs, netCDF files, or access to historical scans.
Get in touch with him via: philip.james@ncl.ac.uk

Urban Studies & Sustainability — free and Open Access resources

As an introduction to publishing in Urban Studies and Sustainability, Bristol University Press and Policy Press has curated a collection of free and open access books and chapters designed to support teaching, research, and policy-focused work.

Access the full Urban Studies & Sustainability Collection via your institution’s library. Contact: bupdigital@bristol.ac.uk

Explore the government’s Areas of Research Interest (ARIs)

Check out the searchable ARI database to find questions relevant to your area of
research: https://ari.org.uk/

Key publication dates from the Climate Change Committee (CCC):

• 25 February: Scotland’s progress in reducing emissions – the CCC’s annual review of the Scottish Government’s progress and assessment of the policies in place for future delivery.
• 20 May: Well-Adapted UK – a new report, five years in the making, setting out what risks the country faces, and what it can do about them. This is part of the CCC’s independent assessment for the Fourth Climate Change Risk Assessment.
• 24 June: UK’s progress in reducing emissions – the CCC’s annual report to Parliament monitoring the UK Government’s progress and current policies.

New course now available:
“An Introduction to Infrastructure and Climate Resilience with NISMOD Courses

The course shows how to use the National Infrastructure Systems Model (NISMOD) toolbox to build and analyse infrastructure networks and their interaction with natural hazards. It includes editable lecture slides, hands-on exercises, sample learning objectives, and a suggested course timetable.

It’s part of Climate Compatible Growth’s FlatPack initiative which aims to integrate open-source energy and financial modelling tools into higher education courses (BSc, MSc, PhD) in universities across the world. It was developed by a team which consists of Environmental Change Institute (ECI), University of Oxford, Oxford Programme for Sustainable Infrastructure Systems, Tom Russell and Silvia Colombo.

curriculum.climatecompatiblegrowth.com/courses/eb078912-ba07-42b2-85cb%027db262f42096

DAFNI Technical Training

A great opportunity to get up to speed quickly on DAFNI and to ask our technical experts your burning questions. Especially recommended for those developing a research proposal and are thinking of including DAFNI as the platform of choice for the research.

To attend the event you will need experience of entering code through a command line interface, for more information and to register your interest, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/dafni3179319835

Access our help

Please contact us directly for any assistance on info@dafni.ac.uk