Watershed management and the Web

Watershed analysis and watershed management are developing as fools of inte grated ecological and economic study They also assist decision-making at th e regional scale. The new technology and thinking offered by the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web is highly complementary to some of the goals of watershed analysis. Services delivered by the Web are open, intera ctive, fast, spatially distributed, hierarchical and flexible. The Web offe rs the ability to display information creatively, to interact with that inf ormation and to change and modify it remotely. In this way the Internet pro vides a much-needed opportunity to deliver scientific findings and informat ion to stakeholders and to link stakeholders together providing for collect ive decision-making. The benefits fail into two major categories: methodolo gical and educational. Methodologically the approach furthers the watershed management concept, offering an avenue for practical implementation of wat ershed management principles. For educational purposes the Web is a source of data and insight serving a variety of needs at all levels. We use the Pa tuxent River case study to illustrate the web-based approach to watershed m anagement A watershed scale simulation model is built for the Patuxent area and if serves as a core for watershed management design based on web appli cations. It integrates the knowledge available for the Patuxent area in a c omprehensive and systematic format, and provides a conceptual basis for und erstanding the performance of the watershed as a system. Moreover the exten sive data collection and conceptualisation required within the framework of the modeling effort stimulates close contact with the environmental manage ment community. This is further enhanced by offering access to the modeling results and the data sets over the Web. Additional web applications and li nks are provided to increase awareness and involvement of stakeholders in t he watershed management process. We argue that it is not the amount and qua lity of information that is crucial for the success of watershed management , but how well the information is disseminated, shared and used by the stak eholders. In this respect the Web offers a wealth of opportunities for the decision-making process, but still to be answered are the questions at what scale and how widely will the Web be accepted as a management tool, and ho w can watershed management benefit from web applications. (C) 1999 Academic Press.