Monitoring Information Systems to Support Adaptive Water Management

Decision making in water resources management is widely acknowledged in literature to be a rational process, based on appropriate information and modeling results. Information plays a fundamental role in improving our understanding of the consequences of, and trade-off among, the alternatives in water resources management. Environmental monitoring networks have the potential to provide a great deal of information for environmental decision processes. Monitoring is widely used to increase our knowledge both of the state of the environment and of socio-economic conditions. Environmental monitoring has demonstrated its capacity within resource management to support decision processes providing knowledge of baseline conditions, to detect change, to establish historical status and trends, to promote long-term understanding or prediction, and to establish the need for, or success of, interventions. Our knowledge of the complexity of water system processes is increasing, together with our awareness of the uncertainty and unpredictability of the effects of water management on system dynamics. Consequently, the demand for environmental information is growing posing new challenges to monitoring system design. This chapter discusses these new challenges and proposes an innovative monitoring design approach to deal with complexity. The conceptual architecture of an Adaptive Monitoring Information System (AMIS) is proposed. The AMIS properties are used in this work to define a framework to assess the capabilities of current monitoring systems to support water managers to cope with complexity and uncertainty. The framework is used to identify the main limitations and to define the potential improvements of TIZIANO monitoring system, developed to monitor the state of groundwater monitoring in the Apulia Region (South Italy).