HR: 1340h
AN: H53F-0543    [Abstracts]
TI: Towards a catchment-scale macro-ecological model to support integrated catchment management in Europe
AU: Lerner, R N
EM: d.n.lerner@shef.ac.uk
AF: Catchment Science Centre, Univesity of Sheffield, Kroto Research Institute, Broad Lane, Sheffield, S3 7HQ United Kingdom
AU: * Lerner, D N
EM: d.n.lerner@shef.ac.uk
AF: Catchment Science Centre, Univesity of Sheffield, Kroto Research Institute, Broad Lane, Sheffield, S3 7HQ United Kingdom
AU: Surridge, B
EM: b.surridge@shef.ac.uk
AF: Catchment Science Centre, Univesity of Sheffield, Kroto Research Institute, Broad Lane, Sheffield, S3 7HQ United Kingdom
AU: Paetzold, A
EM: a.paetzold@shef.ac.uk
AF: Catchment Science Centre, Univesity of Sheffield, Kroto Research Institute, Broad Lane, Sheffield, S3 7HQ United Kingdom
AU: Harris, B
EM: bob.harris@environment- agency.gov.uk
AF: Environment Agency, Olton Court, 10 Warwick Road, Olton, Solihull, B92 7HX United Kingdom
AU: Anderson, C W
EM: c.w.anderson@sheffield.ac.uk
AF: Catchment Science Centre, Univesity of Sheffield, Kroto Research Institute, Broad Lane, Sheffield, S3 7HQ United Kingdom
AB: In Europe, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) is providing a powerful regulatory driver to adopt integrated catchment management, and so pressurizing researchers to build suitable supporting tools. The WFD requires agencies to drive towards `good ecological quality' by 2015. After the initial step of characterising water bodies and the pressures on them, the next substantive step is the preparation of river basin management plans and proposed programmes of measures by 2009. Ecological quality is a complex concept and poorly defined, unless it is taken as a simple measure such as the abundance of a particular species of organism. There is clearly substantial work to do to build a practical but sound definition of ecological quality; practical in the sense of being easy to measure and explain to stakeholders, and sound in the sense that it reflects ecological complexity within catchments, the variability between catchments, and the conflicts demands for goods and services that human society places upon the ecological system. However ecological quality is defined, it will be driven by four interacting groups of factors. These represent the physical, chemical, ecological and socio-economic environments within and encompassing the catchment. Some of these groupings are better understood than others, for example hydrological processes and the transport of solutes are reasonably understood, even though they remain research areas in their own right. There are much larger gaps in our understanding at the interfaces, i.e. predicting how, for example, hydrological processes such as flow and river morphology influence ecological quality. Overall, it is clear we are not yet in a position to build deterministic models of the overall ecological behaviour of catchment. But we need predictive tools to support catchment management agencies in preparing robust plans. This poster describes our current exploration of soft modelling options to build a comprehensive macro-ecological model of UK catchments. This is taking place within the Catchment Science Centre, a joint venture between the University of Sheffield and the Environment Agency.
DE: 1800 HYDROLOGY
DE: 1821 Floods
DE: 1829 Groundwater hydrology
DE: 1860 Streamflow
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005