A decision support system for the assessment and management of surface waters

Water protection is one of the priorities in the preservation of human health and environmental sustainable conditions. Since 2000, the European Union Water Framework Directive (EU-WFD), which establishes a framework for community action in the field of water policy, asks Member States to adopt appropriate assessment methods and management solutions to reach a good ecological status of water bodies by 2015. In this context the lack of appropriate risk-based methodologies and decision support tools was identified. For this reason, we developed a novel Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) based methodology inside a Geographic Information System (GIS) tool for surface water quality and socio-economic evaluations. The resulting Decision Support System (DSS) is called MODELKEY. The MODELKEY DSS is a freeware application built as a Rich Client Platform and Eclipse plug-in for a Java/Eclipse based open source GIS framework (uDig). It has been successfully applied to three case studies representing European key areas: the rivers Llobregat (Spain), Elbe (Czech Republic, Germany) and Scheldt (France, Belgium and The Netherlands). This work is part of the FP6 European project MODELKEY (Contract-No. 511237 (GOCE)).