This blog has a twofold objective: I would like to share my experience as an "inhabitant" and my research on the Tagliamento river.
The Tagliamento is my river, and like all nature lovers, I just love going there (and keeping it as clean as possible).
From a working point of view, however, the Tagliamento somehow guided me in the choices that led me to become a hydrologist, and therefore to study water. When you are a child you ask yourself so many things, I often wondered why there were bubbles in the water of the rivers of Belgrade (the resurgences), and why from one year to the next I could not play in the same place, but I had to scour the riverbed near Belgrade to find new places to invent little big stories (the intertwined canals, the seasonal floods!).
Back in 2015, during my PhD, I won the "AGU Student Video competition" with a video called “Drawing a life through a river". The video is a personal reflection on my life now far from the Tagliamento, the place I keep calling home.
During my PhD I wanted to go to the largest international geosciences conference, the AGU in San Francisco. I had no money to pay for my expenses, but the winner of the competition for the best video, an event sponsored by the conference organizers, would give me a free ticket to the conference (and thus encourage my department to send me to the conference!). The theme was quite free, but I wanted to talk about science in a different way, I wanted to show myself without filters, to go beyond scientific research to show my love for origins and how my passion for water science was born.
A clip from the video!
Since I'm not stubborn at all, I convinced both my partner and my sister to spend their holidays working on the video. The video, of course, was on the Tagliamento, and it had to be done quickly (and, you will understand, even badly, from a technical point of view!). We narrowly made it! Then we also had to share the video on youtube, as the video with the most likes would be the winner. After a couple of stressful days, a head to head with another video, to our surprise, we won !!! I was able to go to the conference and give two presentations, as well as participate in a very useful workshop on home videos :) Here goes the link!
I think this video is a great little starting point of our research path on the Tagliamento.