Implementation of the STREAMES environmental decision-support system

As part of the European-Commission--funded STREAMES project, a system is being developed with the objective of capturing knowledge from water managers and environmental-science experts, regarding nutrients-excess effects in streams and of combining this knowledge into a user-friendly tool to assist water managers in evaluating streams’ nutrient-retention capabilities. In this paper, we summarize the decision-support knowledge components which have been identified in previous work and, based on these, present an implementation of a prototype of an environmental decision-support system. The decision support provided by the system to water managers consists of: (1) diagnosis: inferring possible stream problems, assessing the alteration degree of the stream, and evaluating the source and magnitude of nutrient loads; (2) actions: offering alternative, ranked courses of action to solve possible problems; (3) forecast: providing several scenarios to simulate the effect of the different actions proposed as solutions.