Integrated water assessment and modelling: A bibliometric analysis of trends in the water resource sector

Abstract

There are substantial challenges facing humanity in the water and related sectors and purposeful integration of the disciplines, connected sectors and interest groups is now perceived as essential to address them. This article describes and uses bibliometric analysis techniques to provide quantitative insights into the general landscape of Integrated Water Resource Assessment and Modelling (IWAM) research over the last 45 years. Keywords, terms in titles, abstracts and the full texts are used to distinguish the 13,239 IWAM articles in journals and other non-grey literature. We identify the major journals publishing IWAM research, influential authors through citation counts, as well as the distribution and strength of source countries. Fruitfully, we find that the growth in numbers of such publications has continued to accelerate, and attention to both the biophysical and socioeconomic aspects has also been growing. On the other hand, our analysis strongly indicates that the former continue to dominate, partly by embracing integration with other biophysical sectors related to waterenvironment, groundwater, ecology, climate change and agriculture. In the social sciences the integration is occurring predominantly through economics, with the others, including law, policy and stakeholder participation, much diminished in comparison. We find there has been increasing attention to management and decision support systems, but a much weaker focus 2 on uncertainty, a pervasive concern whose criticalities must be identified and managed for improving decision making. It would seem that interdisciplinary science still has a long way to go before crucial integration with the non-economic social sciences and uncertainty considerations are achieved more routinely.

Climate change effects on the hydrology of the headwaters of the Tagus River: implications for the management of the Tagus–Segura transfer

“…The IBWTs can be an alternative source of supply to basins affected by a decrease in their available resources and/or an increase in their water use demands (Zhang et al, 2015). In turn, the quantity of available water in the donor basins can change significantly, which makes CC a determining factor that must be analysed when assessing the potential or vulnerability of the IBWT (Zhang et al, 2018). Although there are some works that specifically studied the effects of CC on IBWTs, basically the focus has been on changes in the fluvial regimes in donor basins (Zhang et al, 2012;Li et al, 2015).…”

Eight grand challenges in socio-environmental systems modeling

“…Despite the recent theoretical and methodological advances provided above, there is still a chasm between these advances and their actual use in practice to inform decision makers about uncertainty. For example, Zare et al (2017) reveal in their bibliometric analysis of the integrated water assessment and modeling literature the paucity of focus on uncertainty. The gap between theory and practice can reflect differences in deeply rooted epistemological stances (see Section 2.1) and/or inadequate resources being devoted to uncertainty assessment of SES models.…”

Climate change effects on the hydrology of the headwaters of the Tagus River: implications for the management of the Tagus-Segura transfer

“…There are different DSSs for water exploitation systems (Zare et al, 2017). In this work the model applied is the simulation module of AQUATOOL called SIMGES (Pedro-Monzonís et al, 2016b), which is one of the models applied most in Spanish river basins, as well as in other countries (Chile, Italy, Morocco, etc.).…”