Watershed Management over the Web

Watershed analysis and watershed management are developing as tools of integrated ecological and economic study and decision making at a regional scale. The new technology and thinking brought with the advent of Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) is very much complimentary to some of the paradigms of watershed management.

Watershed Management

The watershed management approach has emerged as a holistic and integral way of research, analysis and decision making in a watershed scale. The major impetus of watershed management stems from the understanding that science needs to be linked to planning, and that decision making should be based on broad citizens involvement. In both cases it is important that the information be shared between the stake holders and that it be processed into a format readily percieved by wide and diverse groups, institutions and individuals.

The concept of watershed management approach has made its way to the front stage of environmental research very much in conjunction with the concerns about sustainability and sustainable development. Once it has been realized that sustainability is a systems property and that it requires economic concerns to be considered within the framework of ecological options available and values of the society to be brought in harmony with the carrying capacities of the environment, it started to become clear that the existing administrative and sociogeographic boundaries are not really designed to take into account both the socioeconomic and ecological features of systems. Watersheds seemed to be a reasonable alternative, taking into account the ecological properties of an area as well as the socioeconomic ones.

An important advantage of a watershed approach is that the borders associated with it are objective. Instead of being result of some historical, subjective, oftentimes unfair, voluntaristic or contradictory process, they are totally based on certain geographical characteristics such as relief, which is difficult to change and makes little sense to oppose. In this sense a watershed is a perfect geographic unit around which to build consensus among the multitude of administrative, legal, and public bodies located within.

The watershed concept implies certain geographical characteristics, such as topography, that delimit the territory not only with respect to water flow, but also with respect to other flows: energy, material and information. The watershed boundaries may influence the local atmospheric transport and local climate, migration flows and the associated patterns of species distribution, as well as dispersion flows of pollution. In this respect the flow of water is serving just as an indicator of the relief and landscape characteristics, on the one hand, and as an integrator of many of the processes occurring within the watershed, on the other.

It may be noted that besides the water quality aspect, the watershed criteria for regioning may as well be applied in taking into account other factors, both of ecological and social origin. Historically human settlements have been tending towards sources of water, rivers being the main ones. As a result, most of the human population and the associated manmade pollution and other environmental stress is usually tied to the river network. Therefore the watershed concept has also a social meaning, which is especially important if we are analyzing the ecological processes with respect to external anthropogenic effects. This social aspect is also put into play when the management strategies have to be considered and when the contradicting interests of various parties located along the same resource (or sink) begin counteracting.

The decision making process should be fundamentally restructured in order to take into account all the subsystems in their integrity and all the stake holders with all the diversity of their potentially contradicting interests and concerns. The complexity of this goal is challenging and it can be hardly tackled without innovative technology such as computer modeling and Internet communications. While computer simulations and data processing has been widely recognized and implemented, the advantages of the Internet for watershed management have not been adequately explored.

Placing Watershed Management on the Web

In any case regional management implies a close interaction and linkage between the numerous agents acting in the region. The efficiency of this interaction is a function of the information that is shared among and used by all the stake holders. In many cases it depends not as much on the quality and amount of the information available, what science has been mostly concerned with all this time, but rather on how well the information is disseminate, shared and used. And that is exactly the function that the Internet and the World Wide Web, as a substantial part of it, can offer.

There is a number of features that make WWW an exceptionally important tool for watershed analysis in particular and for regional management in general.

Openness. The Internet is one of the most readily available and reliable media providing information across geographical, administrative, social and economic boundaries. It is cheap and can be accessed by all the stake holders in a watershed and outside of it. The direct access to all the necessary information and, reciprocally, the ability to disseminate the facts that are of concern to particular stake holders is an important prerequisite of watershed management. Interactivity. It is most important for management purposes that the user has the option of interaction with the provider of information and with other stake holders. With the Internet this can by accomplished either via e-mail or directly through forms that can be filled on the web pages and transmitted to the server. These forms can be further manually or automatically processed and posted back on the web. In this case information is not only passively perceived as in case of the traditional media, but it also stimulates direct feedback. Moreover the user can modify the content and format of the existing pages by ordering exerts from data bases or providing scenarios for model runs and thus creating his own output to be immediately viewed on the web. He may also provide additional information to the web in response to the published requests or as a representation of his own findings and concerns. Speed. Communications via the Internet are probably the fastest and the most economic ones, since they do not require any intermediate carriers (as in ordinary mail) and materials (paper, printers as for faxes). Once the information is updated on the server it becomes immediately available for further use and processing. The feedback in many cases can be handled automatically and be directly channeled to the appropriate web link or interest group. Spatial distribution. The Internet access is offered over telephone lines and therefore covers almost the entire planet (if we take into account the satellite communications rapidly developing at present). The various nodes on the Internet can correspond and represent the spatially distributed data of different stake holders on the watershed and outside. The web tools allow to link all this information together, create search engines to find the necessary information and share data and concerns coming from different geographic localities. Hierarchies. The hierarchical structure supported by the web design allows organization of the data in logical and efficient ways, when various branches on the web may present specific fields, domains and interest groups. The links on web pages can join the whole structure together offering cross-references and side views whenever that is necessary. The watershed hierarchy of subwatersheds and sub-subwatersheds can be easily mirrored on the web with specific groups of pages representing each of the particular levels. The hierarchical structure also offers levels of protection for the information, allowing certain domains to be completely open to all users, others being only read-permitted, yet others being accessible only to limited users and interest groups, providing the necessary extent of privacy and discretion. Flexibility is mostly achieved by the interactivity. The new benefits that are offered by Java programming language in many cases allow the data available be processed by the user himself according to his own goals and interests. This is especially important for the modeling tools, because employing the web, they can be made directly accessible to the user, and with Java they can be made sufficiently flexible and user friendly to be used meaningfully and efficiently. The scope of potential use ranges from running particular scenarios, that stake holders can formulate based on their interests, to adjustments in scale and structural detail of the model in response to special needs and projects.

A watershed management web page can be considered as a problem oriented web page that contains the state of the art of data and methods available for decision making in a particular geographic region of a watershed. Web pages of this sort are driven by a certain problem and serve as a means of interactive communication, rather than passive informing.

The numerous stake-holders and interest groups on a watershed can represent themselves in separate web pages that are linked to the root page and cross-referenced when necessary. They are also invited to submit a brief summary of their activities and concerns that will be placed on the root page. Already this stage can be an important part of the consensus building process, when all the varying concerns get summarized at one web site, and it is made open for discussion and can be monitoring a corresponding bulletin-board that serves the purposes of exchanging current opinions and information on hot issues. Three immediate benefits of this clearly emerge:

1. all discussions are precisely documented and filed;
2. they are open to the public and those concerned can immediately follow them and take part;
3. participants do not need to travel to meetings and special hearings, everything can be handled directly from office or home.

A watershed landscape model serves as a core of the page, bringing together the geographic, ecological and socioeconomic data about the watershed and its subsystems. It also helps identify the gaps in information, and its data base becomes the reference book and repository for future research and measurements in the area. It is further linked to other more detailed models and methods that describe different processes or phenomena on the watershed and help preprocess and understand the data.

The social, physical and ecological domains become essentially linked and counteracting. To make a case, a stake holder needs physical, socioeconomic or ecological data, which is readily provided by the watershed data base. He may need to refer to some modeling or data-processing techniques to illustrate his point. These methods are also provided from the web, with applets, that accompany data for simple evaluations, or forms that can be filed and scenarios that can be ordered from the full-scale model or its submodules.

The results are immediately posted on the web and made available for discussion and decision making. The web serves to integrate the knowledge and data available at different institutions and sites, and to offer it to the potential user.

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