Sustainability of Water Withdrawals in the Tiber River Basin (Central Italy)

Abstract

Problems in the sustainable exploitation of water resources are mainly due to the spatial distribution of uses and are worsened by uncontrolled withdrawals by different activities. In this context, in order to evaluate and manage the available water resources, a decision support system has been developed to support the decision-making processes. This system was implemented on a web platform, in order to manage spatial data and to analyze information on water resources. The system also integrates a WEB-GIS engine for the elaboration and regionalization of data over the river network. The web architecture also makes these tools widely accessible and easily shareable by all stakeholders. The Web-based application was tested successfully in the Tiber River Basin (Central Italy) and focuses on the building of a hydrological database together with an evaluation model for surface water resources. The results provide synthetic information on the sustainability of water allocation scenarios, with particular regard to the feasibility of allowing new dissipative water withdrawal, such as dissipative water use in agricultural production for precision irrigation. The software technology of this project relies on open source code and can also be applied in other fields for the sustainable management of environmental resources.

A New Approach to Calculate the Water Exploitation Index (WEI+)

“…The observed FDC, natural FDC, and estimated natural FDC were calculated for each case study basin; in particular, the observed FDC was obtained from time-series data of hydrometric stations in terms of the average FDC (as per Vogel and Fennessey [49]), the natural FDC was obtained from natural daily flow time-series reconstruction by means of observed data and abstractions data [42] and, finally, the estimated natural FDC was the result of the proposed regionalization technique. Figures 4-6 show a comparison between these three types of FDC, where the observed FDC was always clearly majorly influenced by water abstractions (particularly at the end of the FDC), as the irrigation water abstractions had a heavy influence on the monitored flow and depressed the curve irregularly.…”

“…WEB-GIS of water abstractions [42] serves the main instrument to implement the evaluation of the term "abstractions minus returns" in Equations (1) and (3). In fact, for existing water abstractions, an analysis procedure has been developed which, starting from the point selected directly by clicking on the map, finds the upstream basin and, by means of overlay procedures, identifies the water uses in the basin.…”

“…For these reasons, regionalization techniques for the FDC have been produced, as mentioned above, which allow for the use of FDC in ungauged basins. A technique for regionalization of the natural FDC based on the log-normal distribution was used in the present work, which was applied to a suitable time-series of naturalized flows of gauged stations in the Upper Tiber River Basin [42]. To evaluate the suitability of the log-normal model, a measure of the standardized mean square error, commonly referred to as the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) was used [43].…”

Small reservoirs for a sustainable water resources management

“…The water body identification using remote sense data was widely investigated in several geographical contexts. Different satellite platform products were used to compute the NDWI and MNDWI indices (Di Francesco and Giannone, 2019): Landsat images produced an accuracy of extracted water bodies greater than 88 % (Mishra and Prasad, 2015), while for RapidEye imagery the overall accuracy of 95 % was reached (Gideon and Maurice, 2015). Finally, Sentinel-2 multispectral images were tested in Venice coastland (Italy) obtaining an overall accuracy greater than 94 % (Yun et al, 2016) and in the urban area of Beijing and Yantai (China) obtaining an overall accuracy greater than 97 % (Xiucheng et al, 2017).…”

Contribution to decision‐making on establishing the maximum water level for Lake Vegoritida

“…Conventional policy processes usually draw on setting clear strategies and implying “appropriate” sets of management measures traditionally fed from scientific reports. Good science, however, is likely to be ineffective in producing better management when there are communication failures between scientific knowledge producers and users (Casadei, Pierleoni, & Bellezza, ; Sarewitz & Pielke, ). According to Pahl‐Wostl, Mostert, and Tàbara (), a problem we face when dealing with sustainability does not lay so much in a lack of understanding of how ecological systems function, but rather in a lack of understanding how cultural systems are structured and managed, as well as how they interact with ecological systems.…”