Integrated Planning and Decision Support Systems For Sustainable Watershed Development Resource Paper Presented at Study Meeting on Watershed Development Organized by Asian Productivity Organization & The Iranian Ministry of Agriculture 12-17 October 2002, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran

The growing concern about land resource management and the associated decline in land qualities have led to generation of considerable amounts of disciplinary knowledge, collection and management of large disciplinary data-sets from the earth resource processes. This is specially enhanced by the advances in geoinformtaion technology, which has created very efficient possibility of collecting, and managing large amounts of data from earth resource processes in various form and scales. In many cases now the problem is not lack of data/information, but the selection and process of data to generate meaningful and timely information that can support better management of resources. In this line, this paper introduces the resource planning and management process, the trend and the role if information technology, and contributes to development and operationalization of a framework for planning and decision-making to support better management of resources. Here, variety of disciplinary models are integrated in an Integrated Planning and Decision Support System, allowing integration of agro-ecological and agro-economic information derived from variety of sources, to formulate and evaluate various policy options. The methodology is evaluated in a case study, which tries to find the most effective policy instrument that supporting the ground water rehabilitation in La Mancha Region in Spain.