The Role of Problem Solving Environments in Watershed Assessment

Effective watershed management requires that decision-makers receive input about, and balance consideration of, a number of competing factors. The fundamental drivers of watershed change are modifications to landuse and settlement patterns. To model the effects of landuse and settlement changes properly requires, at a minimum, the ability to model effects related to surface and subsurface hydrology, economics, and biology. This means that an effective decision support system must integrate together several models. At the same time, the users of the system are likely to have diverse backgrounds and levels of expertise, and are certain not to be experts in all of the domains that must be modeled. Problem solving environments (PSE) seek to integrate multiple software tools into a single system for solving decisionmaking problems. This paper discusses the role that PSEs can and should play in future watershed modeling and management systems.