An Outline of Modelling Tool Applications in Freshwater Ecosystem and Resource Management. Chapter 9.

Data
2013
Autores
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Benjamin Veress and Jozsi Szigethy (Eds)
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Resumo
The planet’s aquatic ecosystems have been heavily impacted by broad-scale environmental pressures such as agriculture, point and non point-source pollution and changes in land-use. These multiple environmental impacts overlap in space and time, disrupting ecosystem structure and function, resulting in declining quality of surface water bodies such as rivers and reservoirs. The ecological condition of surface water bodies is dictated by a various factors such as physicochemical parameters, hydrology, geomorphology, habitat and biological quality. Catchments situated in densely populated countries are subject to intense pressures from multiple, often competing soil and water uses. Environmental assessment methods must be able to capture key cause-effect relationships between human activity and ecosystem response in order to contribute to sustainable land use planning decisions and projections of ‘what if’ scenarios at the landscape scale. Modelling techniques have many applications; they can be used in decision asupport systems, as a research tool to predict the outcome of user defined scenarios, to guide management strategies in order to meet future targets and to develop Water Framework Directive (WFD) compliant integrated management frameworks. The studies described in this chapter outline models or methodologies that: (i) Serve as tools to characterize and quantify the effect of different types and levels of disturbance on aquatic ecosystem components; and (ii) The development and implementation of aquatic resource management assessment tools based on these findings. The studies describe and discuss findings from works that use Stochastic-Dynamic Methodology (StDM) coupled with a Cellular Automata (CA) model, to capture how expected or predicted changes in factors such as land use, physicochemical quality and hydromorphology affect the quality of rivers and reservoirs in the Douro region of northeastern Portugal. Results from the studies demonstrate how these techniques provide reliable tools for capturing the stochastic environmental dynamics of selected metrics subject to spatially explicit scenarios. The ultimate goal of the models described in this chapter is to couple monitoring assessment and modelling techniques in order to develop end user tools for WFD compliant management and decision making.
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Modelling , Freshwater Ecosystem , Resource Management , Modelling Tool
Citação
Cabecinha E. et al., 2013