Crossing the Death Valley to Transfer Environmental Decision Support Systems to the Water Market

Abstract

sensors, and the overwhelming evidence of environmental strain and global economic issues caused by the extensive pressure on resources exerted by the demands of growing populations indicate that environmental systems composed of multiple interacting agents or variables that cause emergent behavior require complex manage ment strategies. In addition, improving environment-friendly practices related to the use and/or reuse of natural resources to minimize detrimental effects on the natural environment has become a prominent issue. Therefore, increasingly advanced and sophisticated management tools capable of integrating heuristic knowledge and quantitative and qualitative information are required.The initial concept of a decision support system (DSS) emerged in the business, economics, and management sciences. A DSS is an intelligent information system that reduces the time in which decisions are made within a domain and improves the consistency and quality of these decisions. [1] DSSs use a combination of models, analytical techniques, and information retrieval to help develop and evaluate appropriate alternatives; [2,3] and such systems focus on strategic decisions and not operational ones. More specifically, a DSS should contribute to the reduction of the uncertainty faced by managers when they need to take decisions regarding future options. [4] Similar definitions can be found in ref. [5,6] Environmental decision support systems (EDSSs) are a class of DSS that demonstrates all of the capabilities of a DSS on an environmental field scale. [5,7,8] EDSSs have been increasingly applied in more intense and efficient ways, and an increased number of systems have been developed. A metric of their increasing implementation is that more than 3300 references have been cited on this topic in specialized journals over the last ten years (search on SCOPUS on February 2016).The quality and quantity of available water resources is decreasing because of the intensive use of surface and groundwater by cities, industry and agriculture, and the associated impacts of the point pollution and diffuse discharge of the generated wastewater. [9] The optimal and integrated management of water resources is a paradigmatic example of circumstances in which an EDSS can play an important role by integrating data from different origins and with different quality with infrastructures managed by several public and private actors under different legal frameworks with a final goal of preserving Environmental decision support systems (EDSSs) are attractive tools to cope with the complexity of environmental global challenges. Several thoughtful reviews have analyzed EDSSs to identify the key challenges and best practices for their development. One of the major criticisms is that a wide and generalized use of deployed EDSSs has not been observed. The paper briefly describes and compares four case studies of EDSSs applied to the water domain, where the key aspects involved in the initial conception and the use and transfer evolution that determine...

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