This paper presents recent results of a network project aiming at the modelling and simulation of coupled surface and subsurface flows. In particular, a discontinuous Galerkin method for the shallow water equations has been developed which includes a special treatment of wetting and drying. A robust solver for saturated–unsaturated groundwater flow in homogeneous soil is at hand, which, by domain decomposition techniques, can be reused as a subdomain solver for flow in heterogeneous soil. Coupling of surface and subsurface processes is implemented based on a heterogeneous nonlinear Dirichlet–Neumann method, using the dune-grid-glue module in the numerics software DUNE.