Water managers regularly monitor their waters. But monitoring everything everywhere is expensive. Therefore, managers should direct monitoring to towards well-defined goals. If goals are clear there are still many choices to make: which group should be focussed on, how often should sampling take place, what method should be used for sampling and assessment? To support the selection of the best method and organism group(s), with the aim of minimising the costs and maximising the information gathered, a decision support system will be built. The system will be a practical guidance in the application of monitoring programmes necessary to meet the terms and objectives of the Water Framework Directive.
The results of this project will provide guidance on which monitoring strategy to use in which situation. In this Workpackage a decision support system will be developed that will also offer guidance on devising a monitoring network for a stream. The most important work in this Workpackage is to link the organism groups, field methods and assessment methods for the different stream types. This will be done with help of the results from the comparisons of the sampling of different organism groups and the use of different assessment methods in different stream types with different stressors. The advice that the system will give is based on the answers that a water manager gives to the questions asked by the program. Water managers will be guided through the system step by step.
Step 1: Stream characteristics
First of all the water manager should put in the characteristics of the stream (stream type) into the system by answering questions concerning stream characteristics for example:
To make this module work, a stream typology should be made. Relations between stream type, size of the stream and other stream characteristics and the organism groups that should be sampled and the assessment method that has to be used must be extracted from Workpackages 11, 12 and 14. Geographic region and scale are important factors.
Step 2: Monitoring goal
When the stream characteristics are clear the next step for the water manager is to tell the computer system what the monitoring is aimed at. Possibilities include:
In this part of the system the differences between early and late warnings will be particularly important. The organism group, sampling strategy and monitoring scheme strongly depend on the monitoring goal. Workpackage 11 will deliver results that can be used to construct this part of the decision support system.
Step 3: Reference and stressors
Independently of the exact goal of the monitoring (e.g. restoration or standard assessment), the water manager should know how natural the stream is (what is its ecological status), what the reference for the stream is and which disturbances play roles. Examples of questions that the decision support system will ask the manager are:
For constructing this part of the computer program, linkages will be made between stream type, ecological status and reference type (stream type and ecological status network, resulting from Workpackage 11) for different disturbances. The results from Workpackage 12, relationships between organism groups and detection of perturbations will also be included here.
Step 4: Monitoring advice
After having answered all the questions the computer program asks, the water manager will get advice on the appropriate monitoring scheme to adopt. This advice will include consist of several component parts. Examples are:
The main question that has to be solved is 'which of the possible methods is the most cost effective in a certain situation?' Answers will be extracted from the results of Workpackages 11, 12 and 14. The decision support system produces a monitoring scheme in which the most suited (combination of) organism group(s) is given, together with the sampling method, the assessment method and the sampling frequency.
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