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 fact that ecosystem management is based on the principle of preserving ecosystem integrity while maintaining sustainable benefits for human population (Norton, 1992), implies that 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.
Computer simulations and data processing have been widely recognized as important tools for environmental decision making, however there was always a gap between the model developed as a scientific project and the model as an analytical tool for decision making and consensus building. We argue that the Internet and the WWW can actually bridge this gap and make simulations accessible and transparent to the stake-holders involved in watershed management.
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.
General concept of a watershed management web page
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:
- all discussions are precisely documented and filed;
- they are open to the public and those concerned can immediately follow them and take part;
- participants do not need to travel to meetings and special hearings, everything can be handled directly from office or home.
A watershed landscape model, like the Patuxent Landscape Model (PLM) currently developed by our group, serves as a core of the page, bringing together the geographic, ecological and socioeconomic data about the watershed and its subsystems. The PLM is based on the General Ecosystem Model (GEM) (Fitz et al. 1995) and uses the Spatial Modeling WorkstationEnvironment (SME) (Maxwell and Costanza 1996) for spatial articulation of processes on the landscape scale. A similar approach is currently being implemented in the Everglades in Florida to examine the implications of management strategies on elements of the ecosystem such as water levels, nutrient dynamics, and plant successional patterns (Fitz et al. 1993).
Main processes and functional modules simulated within GEM
A model used as a core of the watershed analysis web application 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. We argue that in this case in addition to providing an analytical tool for simulations and data analysis, the model also offers its data structures and conceptualization to the benefit of the WWW user.
Three integral components of Watershed analysis and Management