Supporting the European Water Framework Directive: The HarmoniQuA Modelling Support Tool (MoST)

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires a holistic approach to water management, developing River Basin Management Plans to ensure good ecological status in water bodies. Modelling will form a vital component in defining ecological conditions and developing an appropriate programme of measures to attain good status. However, model credibility can be affected by various problems, including miscommunication within and between multi-disciplinary model teams and stakeholders, ambiguous terminology, poor documentation, inadequate model development/application procedures, and lack of easily available guidance. Given these concerns, the HarmoniQuA project has developed a software-based Modelling Support Tool (MoST) and Knowledge Base (KB) to provide generic guidance and harmonised Quality Assurance procedures across a range of selected scientific domains (groundwater, precipitation-runoff, hydrodynamics, floodforecasting, water quality, biota, and socioeconomics). The guidance helps to ensure a model is properly applied using consistent procedures (see Figure 1), a recording function allows decisions, methods and data use to be logged in a structured model journal, and a reporting function provides summary reports dedicated to specific users. MoST was developed by a broad based project team through consultation with a range of professionals. Feedback and critical evaluation from independent, internal and external reviewers has confirmed the potential of MoST to improve model credibility, but recognised that perceptions of the effort required by users and organisations will be critical to its adoption.