We invented an integrative and interdisciplinary model for management of watershed outcomes that called biopsyhosocial model with four dimensions: cultural

development, economic development, social welfare and positive psychosocial

transformation. Please find more information on this issue in: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02185385.2013.800297

Dear Raoof

I am sending 3 papers may be useful for you

a) Environ Sci Technol. 2013 Aug 6;47(15):8083-90.

Measuring environmental sustainability of water in watersheds.

Hester ET, Little JC.

b) J Environ Manage. 2009 Apr;90(5):1854-61.

A spatially explicit framework for quantifying downstream hydrologic conditions.

Strager MP, Petty JT, Strager JM, Barker-Fulton J.

c) Sci Total Environ. 2014 Mar 1;473-474:88-102.

An index-based robust decision making framework for watershed management in a changing climate.

Kim Y1, Chung ES2.

@Raoof, this paper seems helpful! Integrated watershed management optimization model is given!

http://engineering.tufts.edu/cee/people/vogel/documents/integratedWatershed.pdf

Raoof, very valuable question. I see contributors give you highly professional answers. But first of all you have to be aware of Law support at national level. In Russia we do not have such support and no of above mentioned measures and models can not be used in practice.

Dear Raoof,

The first approach to take in consideration is THE SCALE of watershed. As wider is the watershed as more complexity of the model needs to be taken in analysis.

Then Valery is right with low support; if at a lower scale of the watershed its management depends more of the local authority decision, at a wider scale the management can involve national decisions and lows.

Dear Raoof,

I would at first separate between "frameworks", "models" and "approaches". To agree with some of the previous answers, I would start with the frameworks. If you mean legal frameworks, you could have a look at the European Water Framework Directive for the European Union or the Clean Water Act in the US. Furthermore, the National Water Initiative for Australia, the National Water Resources Management System in Brazil, or the Water Pollution Prevention and Control Law in China. It depends what you what you want to achieve or which objectives you have for your river basin. There are several (pragmatic or not very much pragmatic) decision support systems for environmental and river basin management, if you want to get a bit more specific, you will find numerous models. The Australians use mostly a bit more "pragmatic" but nevertheless valuable approaches, a very "famous" and open source model is the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). Although I worked on the development of DSS and also SWAT and other models, there is still a need that such models get more accepted in the "practice" (see Valerys comment - who can or who uses it in practice and why (not)?). Have a look at my website with some of my papers and let me know if you intersted in some (but you will find these papers also under my ResearchGate profile).

http://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=4076

But there numerous other very valuable papers and experiences out.

Hope that helps,

Martin

Arc hydro and Arc swat can be used>> this can be downloaded and can be used as add on in ARC GIS platform..I am working on arc swat..requirements to run this model is up to you.the accuracy of output is dependent of what data you put as to run it takes very specific data format..

Dear Raoof

Are you familiar with WEAP?

see the link:

http://www.weap21.org/

I have used SWAT and it has been proved to work nicely in a variety of catchments. In fact, I think that is one of the most used worldwide. You can check it out in:

http://swat.tamu.edu/

Its version as an ArcGIS extension is quite instinctive and in the website you can also check courses dates. I have done a couple of them and they were quite productive.

Hope it helps.

@Dear All, Thanks a lot for your valuable inputs, useful recommended papers/softwares.

@ Valery, Good point.

@ Martin, thanks for your explanation on the terms used.

Given the complexity of watershed issues, and a really "INTEGRATED" management, we need for integrated solutions (Considering whole system rather than attend to individual problems)

Linking it all together (land, water, vegetation, biodiversity, local communities and cultures, stakeholders)

Going to the main question, I want to concentrate on the "INTEGRATION ENGINE"

The role of integration engine is pulling together the components of biophysical, socio-economic, and ecologic models. In other hand I am looking for a step before the final decision. (Australian experiences are more useful)

I'm looking for a framework leading to an informed decision/s in watershed scale (may a DSS platform).

Again thanks.

Regards,

The following papers may be of interest:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222412859_Integrated_assessment_modelling_for_water_resource_allocation_and_management_A_generalised_conceptual_framework?ev=srch_pub

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257549879_Selecting_among_five_common_modelling_approaches_for_integrated_environmental_assessment_and_management?ev=srch_pub

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222159542_Evolution_of_an_approach_to_integrated_adaptive_management_The_Coastal_Lake_Assessment_and_Management_(CLAM)_tool?ev=srch_pub

Article Integrated assessment modelling for water resource allocatio...

Article Selecting among five common modelling approaches for integra...

Article Evolution of an approach to integrated adaptive management: ...

This is a very crucial question. Wesley Powell, scientist geographer, put it best when he said that a watershed is: "that area of land, a bounded hydrological system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community." As a result, the watershed is often taken as a fundamental physiological social-economic-ecological unit in environmental studies. It is a complex adaptive system and as such must be treated, Health, in this context, is a term that has been used in relation to both human health and the condition of the environment. If we think of watershed as a complex social-ecological adaptive system health would refer to the maintenance of the "normal" state of such system. Indeed, the usual state of affairs in living systems like watersheds is one of systems fluctuating around some trend (increasing or decreasing) or stable average; however, sporadically, this condition is interrupted by an abrupt shift to a radically different regime. Disturbance can be deemed as an event causing departure of a living system from the ‘‘normal range’’ of conditions typical of its basin of attraction. The apparent paradox that disruption of the existing order (i.e., disorder) and persistence (i.e., order, stability) always coexist in living systems such as watersheds is addressed by the concept of resilience, defined as the amount of disturbance a system can absorb without shifting into an alternative state and losing function and services. Such a concept seeks to explain how disorder and order usually work together, allowing living systems to assimilate disturbance, innovation, and change, while at the same time maintaining characteristic structures and processes. In this respect, integrated management of health in watersheds would be referred to the management of resilience capacity of a system in order to maintain characteristic structures and processes within the same basin of attraction. Fortunately, the complexity of living systems of people and nature emerges not from a random association of a large number of interacting factors but rather from a smaller number of key-controlling processes (Holling 2001; Gunderson and Holling 2002). Much of the fundamental nature of systems can often be captured and described by single key state variables, as many features of the system’s state tend to shift in concert with a few important key-state variables (Holling 2001). In watersheds this is mainly typically ruled by the entire water cycle in terms of amounts and quality. The problem is that often we do not know the overall water budget in watersheds and which are the most critical phases and residence times in the cycle.

I'd like to add something more. In the context of sustainable development of entire social-ecological systems like watersheds, to me an adaptive approach to watershed management still provides a fundamental framework for the implementation and adaptation of land management and polices of humans-in-nature over time as more information is collected. A crucial issue then could be developing landscape planning in watershed (e.g., restoration) that might accommodate for surprises and for variation of land-use pattern and water cycle as humans will change land-use, and especially land management, to adjust to climate change. In this respect, new conceptual frameworks for the design of landscape sustainability are emerging to establish how landscape condition can be made sustainable in face of unpredictable disturbance and change (e.g., Olsson et al., 2004; Folke et al., 2005; Musacchio, 2009; Opdam et al., 2009; Ostrom, 2009; Benayas and Bullock 2012; Zurlini et al., 2013; Jones et al., 2013).

Strategies to this end could involve the design and management of landscape elements and structure to create less contagious and more heterogeneous rural landscapes enhancing biodiversity-oriented connectivity. In this respect, smallholder farming systems are crucial for rural sustainability. This can imply the strategic placement of managed and semi-natural ecosystems in landscapes to reduce water stress intensity, so the services of natural ecosystems (e.g., commodities, water availability, pollination, reduced land erosion, soil formation) can be even enhanced (Jones et al., 2013). Land separation and land sharing are examples of such strategies (Benayas and Bullock, 2012). The first involves restoring or creating non-farmland habitat in agricultural landscapes through, for example, woodlands, natural grasslands, hedgerows, wetlands, and meadows on arable lands (Benayas and Bullock, 2012), or riparian habitats (Jones et al., 2010) to benefit wildlife and specific services. Land sharing involves the adoption of biodiversity-based agricultural practices, learning from traditional farming practices, transformation of conventional agriculture into organic agriculture and of „„simple‟‟ crops and pastures into agro-forestry systems. Some existing smallholder farming systems already have high water-, nutrient-, and energy-use efficiencies and conserve resources and biodiversity without losing yield (Kiers et al., 2008).

A key aspect is to implement monitoring programs in watersheds to evolve iteratively as new information emerges and research and managing questions change. This helps evaluate how environmental targets and ecosystem services respond to specific landscape pattern designs in watersheds, and whether or not certain landscape patterns at multiple scales result in synergies and trade-offs among different types of ecosystem services. In a nutshell, learning from what we are doing and from what we have already done.

I agree with Barry Croke. @ Barry Croke, thanks man for citing the papers.