The misalignment of the boundaries of watersheds and jurisdictions is cited often as a barrier to effective water governance, but the validity of the assertion depends on watershed scale and the decisions or processes involved. The paper probes these decision processes and their alignment with scales of natural watersheds and with governance processes. Two examples from the USA provide context and data to inform the discussion, one from the humid eastern part and one from the drier western part. Ultimately, the spatial and governance scales determine the complexity of decisions. The major issue is the level and nature of negotiations and how stakeholders communicate and work with each other to resolve issues in a form of pragmatic federalism, where the concept merges into decentralization to the subwatershed level. At smaller scales, negotiations can be worked out in person-to-person venues but at larger scales institutions have their own trajectories and inertia. Ultimately, watershed boundaries can be effective for joint planning and assessment, but decisions follow governance patterns. Basin boundaries do provide venues for coordination mechanisms to mediate conflicts.
There are many ways of testing and understanding your water quality with online scientific tools and models. One such resource is the National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) project run by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The project, which was founded in 1991 to develop reliable information about water sources to support decisions on water quality management and policy at every governmental level, uses several different types of modeling and analysis tools to estimate nutrient fluxes, pesticide concentrations...
The hydrographic network in the Iberian Pyrite Belt (IPB) (south-west Europe) is intensively affected by acid mine drainage (AMD) processes. This represents a unique worldwide scenario of extractive mining activity for more than 4,000 years. In order to be able to achieve possible restorations, it is necessary to reduce the scale of possible actions for future environmental improvements, at the river basin level. Therefore, the delineation of watersheds and subwatersheds in the IPB has been carried out, as well...
Rainfall–runoff process identification, due to uncertainties and complexities, requires advanced modeling strategies. For this end, this study presented different strategies to explore spatio-temporal variation of rainfall–runoff process for the Ajichay watershed located in northwest Iran. Extreme learning machine (ELM) was used to predict the runoff in conceptual models. First, a geomorphology integrated ELM (G-ELM) was used to predict watershed runoff in multiple-stations form for the watershed. The spatial and...
Climate changes, as well as land cover changes, affect the flow regimes in streams. Understanding the contributions of climate variables and land cover changes on low flows will help planners and decision makers to improve water resources management. An approach which uses data driven artificial neural networks (ANNs) is proposed in this study. Land cover, rainfall, snow and temperature were used as inputs to the ANN model. In this approach, an index called relative strength effect was used to assess the contributi...
This study, which designs a model for integrated watershed management in Iran, is based on qualitative research applying a grounded theory methodology. Interviewing was the main tool for gathering data. Using snowball sampling, we chose three categories of informants: (a) academics and experienced natural resource experts, (b) representatives of active environmental non-governmental organizations, and (c) local people. Integrated watershed management was constituted from contextual conditions (i.e., physical...
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