This paper describes a spatially-explicit agent-based model of river basin land use and water management. The model is being implemented within a project aimed at investigating ways of synthesising stakeholder priorities, taking the EU Water Framework Directive as a case study. There are many human activities that take place in a river basin and can alter the ecological status of the water, and...

Limited availability of freshwater and increasing demand for food require careful management of available resources. However, information on water utilization within river basins is often inadequate for comprehensive water management. Therefore, researchers are developing new tools and methodologies to overcome these data problems. A major concern for land use planning is the identification of ...

The Lake Champlain Basin in Vermont and New York, USA and Quebec, Canada includes a large lake and watershed with complex management issues. A transboundary comprehensive management plan prepared for the lake includes 11 goals across many issue areas. We developed a choice experiment to examine public preferences for alternative Lake Champlain management scenarios across these issue areas. Five...

The Sinos River Basin is often mentioned as a highly degraded watershed. A series of impacts on water quality, soil and air has been reported in this environment on a recurring basis over the years. This situation of environmental degradation has its origins in a process of huge economic development uncoupled from environmental conservation concerns. The intense consequent urbanization observed...

Papers published in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions are under open-access review for the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Abstract Rare attempts to use knowledge technologies and other relevant approaches are found in the river basin management. Some applications of expert systems as well as utilization of soft computing techniques (as neural networks or genetic algor...

This paper presents a water resources sustainability index that makes it possible to evaluate and compare different water management policies with respect to their sustainability. The sustainability index identifies policies that preserve or improve the desired water management characteristics of the basin in the future. This index is based on a previous sustainability index with improvements i...

Recent and future river basin management requires a more spatially distributed description of basin hydrology and nutrient transport processes to enable land use management as a process controlling factor to realize sound river basin management. The spatial description of these processes in the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) watershed model is presently realized by aggregating the flows ...