Harmonised Principles for Public Participation in Quality Assurance of Integrated Water Resources Modelling

The main purpose of public participation in integrated water resources modelling is to improve decision-making by ensuring that decisions are soundly based on shared knowledge, experience and scientific evidence. The present paper describes stakeholder involvement in the modelling process. The point of departure is the guidelines for quality assurance for `scientific` water resources modelling developed under the EU research project HarmoniQuA, which has developed a computer based Modelling Support Tool (MoST) to provide a user-friendly guidance and a quality assurance framework that aim for enhancing the credibility of river basin modelling. MoST prescribes interaction, which is a form of participation above consultation but below engagement of stakeholders and the public in the early phases of the modelling cycle and under review tasks throughout the process. MoST is a flexible tool which supports different types of users and facilitates interaction between modeller, manager and stakeholders. The perspective of using MoST for engagement of stakeholders e.g. higher level participation throughout the modelling process as part of integrated water resource management is evaluate

Structuring multidisciplinary knowledge for model-based water management: the HarmoniQuA approach

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) provides European policy at the river basin scale. It explicitly states that water resource models should be applied. The EU- financed project HarmoniQuA aims at improving the quality of model based water management at catchment and river basin scales by providing guidance throughout the modelling process and by supporting all persons involved (water managers, modellers, auditors, stakeholders and concerned members of the public) in their activities. The guidelines are based on accepted and common methodology and practices of experienced modellers. This knowledge is collected, completed, improved and made available in the form of a Knowledge Base, using state-of-the-art knowledge engineering technology with an ontological approach. MoST, the software tool of HarmoniQuA, provides guidance from the Knowledge Base it supports monitoring of the modelling activities and reporting to various audiences. In the future MoST will use expertise collected in previous modelling studies to advise on how to perform the model study at hand. This paper focuses on how HarmoniQuA handles and improves existing knowledge on modelling for water managemen

Quality Assurance of the modelling process

The present paper briefly describes a new modelling support tool (MoST) aimed at facilitating better quality assurance of the modelling process. MoST comprises a Knowledge Base with guidelines on good modelling practise for seven scientific domains. It supports multi-domain modelling and working in teams of different user types (water managers, modellers, auditors/reviewers, stakeholders and members of the public). The key functionality of MoST is to: (a) Guide to ensure that a model has been properly applied; (b) Monitor to record decisions, methods and data used in the modelling work and in this way enable transparency and reproducibility of the modelling process; (c) Report to provide suitable reports on what has been done by the various actors. MoST has been developed under the HarmoniQuA project (www.HarmoniQuA.org