Dr. Jim Nelson has made exceptional contributions to the advancement of water resources data around the world, pioneering scientific and global collaboration through the GEO Global Water Sustainability Initiative (GEOGLOWS) and the open sharing of Earth observation data. After a career developing capacity in water resources management in Latin America, he was introduced to GEO at the Plenary held in Geneva in 2014 while working with the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences (CUAHSI) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to demonstrate the value of water-data-sharing standards that ultimately led to WaterML. He quickly captured the vision of GEO to deliver actionable, intelligent hydrologic information derived from Earth observations for the benefit of national services, and used his connections across government, academia, and business to lead an effort to develop a global 15-day forecast and multi-decade historical simulation on every river in the world.