Design considerations for watershed management decision support systems

Increasing attention is being paid to the management of water resources on a watershed basis, necessitating a cross-disciplinary approach to data collection and analysis. Traditional assessments of water quality and quantity are being joined by assessments of biology, botany, geomorphology, and anthropological subjects such as economic valuation This integrated problem domain calls for a reassessment of the information technology tools designed to support the management process. With a comprehensive requirements analysis pulled from a survey of water resource practitioners, the functions necessary for design of a contemporary watershed management decision support system (WMDSS) are outlined and assessed in light of current tools in use today. Following a systems engineering methodology, the WMDSS requirements are analyzed and ranked in order of priority. This yields a ranking for development of tool and information functional groups to support the following assessment types: surface water quality, surface levels and flows, integration, groundwater flows/levels, rainfall/runoff modelling and time series analysis. Functional analysis then provides the architecture and data flows necessary to meet system requirements. The WMDSS functional analysis is concluded with a recommended architecture for design of such a system. This sets the foundation for follow-on work in production and validation of the system.