Digital Commons Network^™

Saferplaces Global Platform: An Ai-Based Digital Twin Solution For Flood Risk Intelligence In Urban Areas [Online], Stefano Bagli, Paolo Mazzoli, Valerio Luzzi, Lorenzo Borelli

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Our cities are flooding with increased frequency due to more severe weather events and a growing anthropogenic pressure (i.e., soil sealing, urban expansion, man induced land-subsidence, etc.). An accurate and detailed characterization of flood hazard is a fundamental step in order to improve or optimize the resilience of cities to potential flood losses and damages. SaferPLACES platform provides a cost-effective and user-friendly cloud-based solution for flood hazard and risk management in urban areas. The flood intelligence underlying the SaferPLACES platform integrates the following main components: 1) a Digital Twin automatic generator able to exploit the available big open climate and …

Assessing The Groundwater Vulnerability To Nitrates And Pesticides Within The Geospatial Decision Support System Landsupport, Marialaura Bancheri, Alessia Perego, Giuliano Langella, Daniele Lezzi

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This work presents how to assess the groundwater vulnerability to both pesticides and nitrate within the geospatial Decision Support system (s-DSS) of LandSupport, though two new web-based, freely-available dynamical tools, named the pesticide fate tool and nitrate fate tool. The pesticide fate tool is based on the extended transfer function model (TFM-ext), specifically expanded to consider the transport of reactive solutes, i.e., pesticides. The nitrate fate tool is based on the coupling of the ARMOSA model, used to simulate the crop growth dynamics and the consequent nitrate leaching within the most biological active zone (i.e. the rooting depth of the …

A System Dynamic Approach For Managing Transboundary Water Systems, Santosh S. Palmate, Saurav Kumar, Rocky Talchabhadel, Esmaiil Mokari

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Transboundary waters are vital to the sustainability and survival of human communities on the U.S.-Mexico border region, a nearly 2,000 mile-long arid zone in North America currently affected by climate uncertainties. We focus on the Rio Grande–Hueco Bolson (RG-HB; also known as Rio Bravo–Valle de Juarez in Mexico) water system, which is essential for the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez region. Water management in the region is characterized by limited and dwindling water supplies, increasing demands for water from multiple sectors, and a segmented governance system spanning two U.S. states and two countries. The region faces several drivers of change, including climate …

Improving Water Distribution Network Data Extraction From Rawgpr Images With Multi-Agent Techniques And Machine Learning, Gemma Stanton, David Ayala-Cabrera

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Concerns around climate change, disaster resilience, and digitization underscore the importance of reliable and affordable information about critical infrastructure such as water distribution networks (WDNs) in order to prevent/mitigate potential negative effects. For instance, lack of data from WDNs enables problems such as leaks to persist undetected. While manual and destructive detection methods exist to monitor the health of WDNs (e.g., impact echo, laser scan, among others), these methods lack the power to provide comprehensive data for continuous modelling, operation, assessment, and maintenance. Ground penetrating radar (GPR) offers one non-destructive testing method that is inexpensive and easily operable; however, the …

Optimal Management Of Irrigation Water Using Ant Colony Optimisation, Duc Cong Hiep Nguyen, Holger Maier, Graeme Dandy

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Irrigation is vital for food production in many parts of the world, particularly in dry areas or in periods of water scarcity. However, with growing water demands due to population growth, economic development and climate change, there is likely to be a significant reduction in the amount of water available for irrigation. This challenges how to manage the available irrigation water in the most effective way. The feasible solutions of this problem are (i) the optimal allocation of land and water resources for irrigation management to maximise net return, subject to constraints on area and water allocation and (ii) the …

The Quantification And Valuation Of Food Provision In The H2020 Landsupport Project, Angelo Basile, Marialaura Bancheri, Alessia Perego, Marco Botta

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Many tools are nowadays available for ecosystem services evaluation, including those referring to provisioning services (Grêt-Regamey et al., 2017). In the case of the geospatial approach developed in the H2020 LandSupport (LS) project, we decided to use the concept of equivalent wheat to compare potential provisioning services in the geospatial domain. In fact, the estimation of the ecosystem service provided by soils could be highly variable in function of the change in crops and then the specific land use and management. In addition, the choice of using equivalent wheat to analyze different areas allows to express the ecosystem service in …

Modelling Application For A Multiple Ecosystem Services Quantification Within The Geospatial Decision Support System Landsupport, Angela Puig-Sirera, Antonio Coppola, Angelo Basile, Piero Manna

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Ecosystem services (ES) in the last years have been a topic in the spotlight of scientific community and policy, being a global challenge in the agenda of European environmental policies (e.g., European Green Deal). The research community aims to classify and quantify these services but to date there are no standardized approaches. Rather, different approaches are used that are expert-based or empirical, qualitative rather than quantitative, applied depending on the spatial scale and output required. Here we present our approach to the quantitative evaluation of provision and regulating ESs, in which the soil is considered a key factor in regulating …

A Multiscale Geospatial Decision Support System For Sustainable Land Management: The Lansupport Project, Fabio Terribile, Multiple Co-Authors

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Geo-Spatial Decision Support Systems (S-DSSs) are becoming increasingly popular since they provide operational tools to a large community of end-users and policy-makers for multiscale land planning and management. Moreover, they promise to better connect scientists and end-users over landscapes management (e.g. farmers and planners). In this context, the H2020 LandSupport project (https://www.landsupport.eu) aims at i) supporting sustainable agriculture and forestry, ii) evaluating trade-off between different land uses and iii) contributing to the development and implementation of land use policies in Europe. More than 100 operational tools are going to be implemented in a Web-based Land S-DSS, built on a smart …

A Multiscale Geospatial Decision Support System For Sustainable Land Management: The Lansupport Project, Fabio Terribile

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Geo-Spatial Decision Support Systems (S-DSSs) are becoming increasingly popular since they provide operational tools to a large community of end-users and policy-makers for multiscale land planning and management. Moreover, they promise to better connect scientists and end-users over landscapes management (e.g. farmers and planners). In this context, the H2020 LandSupport project (https://www.landsupport.eu) aims at i) supporting sustainable agriculture and forestry, ii) evaluating trade-off between different land uses and iii) contributing to the development and implementation of land use policies in Europe. More than 100 operational tools are going to be implemented in a Web-based Land S-DSS, built on a smart …

Data Driven Methods For Real-Time Flood, Drought And Water Quality Monitoring: Applications For Internet Of Water, Brianna Pagán

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The Internet of Water (IoW) is a large-scale permanent IoT sensor network with 2500 water quality sensors spread across Flanders, Belgium. This intelligent system will permanently monitor water quality and quantity in real-time. Such a dense network of sensors with high temporal resolution will provide unprecedented volumes of data for drought, flood and pollution management, prediction and decisions. Here we present several data mining and machine learning initiatives along with a database infrastructure which supports environmental modelling efforts and large scale monitoring networks like IoW. Examples include interpolating grab sample measurements to river stretches to monitor salinity intrusion. A shallow …

Data Driven Methods For Real-Time Flood, Drought And Water Quality Monitoring: Applications For Internet Of Water, Brianna Pagán

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The Internet of Water (IoW) is a large-scale permanent IoT sensor network with 2500 water quality sensors spread across Flanders, Belgium. This intelligent system will permanently monitor water quality and quantity in real-time. Such a dense network of sensors with high temporal resolution will provide unprecedented volumes of data for drought, flood and pollution management, prediction and decisions. Here we present several data mining and machine learning initiatives along with a database infrastructure which supports environmental modelling efforts and large scale monitoring networks like IoW. Examples include interpolating grab sample measurements to river stretches to monitor salinity intrusion. A shallow …

Development Of Watershed Delineation Tool Using Open Source Software Technologies, Jae Sung Kim, David Arden Patterson

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Watershed delineation tool was developed in the Environmental Resource Assessment & Management System (eRAMS) platform using open source software technologies. This tool processes Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and DEM-driven raster data to delineate watersheds using two open source software technologies, TauDEM and GDAL. Users can upload their own DEM or create one using NHDPlusV2, which is provided by default in eRAMS watershed delineation tool. During processing of the DEM, it was found that the flat area was excluded in the stream raster pixels calculated from TauDEM ‘Peuker Douglas’ module; therefore this module was modified to include stream pixels on flat …

Modeling Dynamics Of Ecological Systems With Geospatial Networks And Agents, Taylor Anderson, Suzana Dragicevic

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Landscape connectivity networks are composed of sets of nodes representing georeferenced habitat patches that link together based on the maximum dispersal distance of a species of interest. Graph theory is used to measure the structure and connectivity of resulting networks to inform dispersal patterns, identify key habitat patches, and assess how changes in structure disrupts dispersal patterns. Despite their potential, landscape connectivity networks are mostly static representations, formed using maximum dispersal distance only, and thus do not account for network structure as a function of variation in habitat patch attributes and complex spatio-temporal dispersal dynamics. The main objective of this …

Cyberinfrastructure For Enhancing Interdisciplinary Engagement In Coastal Risk Management Research, Ayse Karanci, Lisa Stillwell, Christopher Lenhardt, Casey Dietrich

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Today, tackling critical questions often requires the collaboration of researchers from different disciplines or institutions. Coastal hazards research is necessarily interdisciplinary and multi-methodological and often requires a team of researchers. This paper introduces an interdisciplinary coastal hazard risk model which combines high resolution geospatial data, storm impact forecasts, and an agent-based model in the analysis and describes the model’s application in a data science cyberinfrastructure.

The implementation of the coastal hazard risk model in the cyberinfrastructure involved partitioning the model into three parts: 1) Geospatial analyses: analyzes housing developments and the coast to create a household database. (2) Storm evaluation: …

Space-Time Uncertainty Propagation Of Input Precipitation Across A Coupled Rainfall-Runoff Urban Drainage Model, Arturo Torres-Matallana, Ulrich Leopold

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Rainfall is one important source of uncertainty in the simulation of combined sewer overflows and the emissions of pollutants to the receiving water body. Studies often ignore the spatial dimension treating input rainfall as a non-spatially distributed time series. Neglecting spatial and space-time distribution of rainfall entering urban drainage systems may result in inaccurate quantification of rainfall and, hence, in substantial uncertainties associated to water quantity and quality predictions. We developed a space-time interpolation model for rainfall, based on space-time Kriging, using point rainfall measurements as the primary variable. We then interpolated rainfall over space and time and built a …

Microservices For The Stream Visual Assessment Protocol (Svap), Jack R. Carlson, Casey Sheley, Rumpal Sidhu, Shaun Case, Olaf David

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The Stream Visual Assessment Protocol (SVAP) provides an initial assessment of the overall condition of wade-able streams, their riparian zones, and instream habitats. Field conservationists use the tool when providing technical assistance to land owners to improve stream conditions, sustainable use, and value of their property. SVAP does not require extensive training in biology, geomorphology, or hydrology, and represents a first step towards more detailed analysis and recommendations as needed. The protocol was developed in 1999 by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Aquatic Assessment Workgroup, following two years of field study and validation involving 182 stream reaches in …

Spatio Temporal Analysis Of Floods At A Catchment Scale, Ignacio Fuentes, Jose Padarian, R.W. Vervoort

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Episodic flood events have a significant impact on ecosystems and human settlements, and can be important drivers for the water availability. This study maps the flood extension at a catchment scale, and determines the volumes associated with inundation events for selected return periods by coupling a water detection algorithm and three methods for water depth estimation. The study was carried out in the Namoi catchment of Australia by using the Google Earth Engine platform. The extension of inundated areas was obtained by applying the open water likelihood (OWL) algorithm on MODIS surface reflectance imagery. For the estimation of the associated …

Integrating Socio-Environmental Models: Vegetation, Agriculture, And Landform Dynamics, Miguel Acevedo, William Boyd, Hessam Sarjoughian, Isaac Ullah, Michael Barton

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

How did landscapes evolve as agriculture emerged thousands of year ago? How do we ensure sustainable food production and still maintain environmental quality? Integrated socio-environmental models help provide answers to these two seemingly distant, yet related questions. For practical purposes, in this paper we use the terms socio-ecological and socio-environmental systems, with acronym SES as synonyms. The Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics (MedLand) project aims to develop experimental SES models made possible by recent advances in computation while exercising interdisciplinary collaboration. In this paper, we exemplify one aspect of this integration by discussing the development of a vegetation model, which at the …

Progress And Challenges Supporting Environmental Models And Data Deployed As Integrated Services For Small To Large User Communities, Jack R. Carlson, Olaf David, Ken W. Rojas, Paul Hishmeh

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

During the past two decades, the Object Modeling System (OMS) framework evolved from a tool for building, testing, and validating environmental models in a consistent, non-invasive manner as an assembly of science components to include the Cloud Services Integration Platform (CSIP) for their deployment and integration as web services with business systems of public and private organizations, as well as university research programs. Currently OMS/CSIP repositories contain 292 web services organized in 31 service layers for (1) hydrology and water resources management, (2) erosion and sediment transport, (3) conservation resource management, (4) data access, retrieval, and management, (5) geospatial and …

Urban Development In Ushuaia, Patagonia Argentina: Assessing Challenges For Native Forests’ Conservation And Modelling Uncertainty In Ecosystem Services Provision., Clara Mosso

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Argentina’s Native Forests Protection Act # 26,331 enforces the use of spatial planning as a tool to regulate native forest’s land use. However, it focuses on agricultural expansion as the main cause of forest loss while excluding other drivers, like urban expansion. Consequently, there is a lack of guidelines for the spatial planning of native forests in urban and wildland-urban interface areas. In particular, the city of Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego (Argentina) has been suffering an extraordinary population increase and the unplanned establishment of new settlements in the last decades. This occurs in a context of human and ecosystem …

Participatory Mapping And Modeling Of Land Change In Coastal South Carolina: The Johns Island Community Conservation Initiative., Jelena Vukomanovic, Lindsey S. Smart, Georgina M. Sanchez, Zeynab S. Jouzi, Erin O. Sills

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Johns Island, SC, is experiencing unprecedented growth that threatens unique natural and cultural resources reflecting the island's rich civil rights era history and a near-contiguous landscape of mixed forest types, wetlands, agriculture and waterways. The Johns Island Community Conservation Initiative was created to advance a comprehensive conservation effort on the island. We a) identified which areas are most important (and why) to Johns Islanders using an iterative, participatory process, and b) modeled future land use change and development scenarios to identify areas at greatest risk. These efforts will lead to the development of a conservation toolkit that reflects both landowner …

Toward Real-Time Water Quality Forecasts, Alison P. Appling, Jacob A. Zwart, Fernando R. Salas, David L. Blodgett, Laura A. Decicco, Jordan S. Read

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Forecasts of river solute concentrations 1 hour to 30 days in the future could aid in predicting harmful algal blooms and engaging a now-focused public in discussions of local environmental conditions. Additionally, because first-generation concentration forecasts are likely to contain large inaccuracies, making these forecasts readily available opens doors to detecting new or previously unrecognized point sources, transformation hot spots, and other influential drivers. We applied calibrated solute models to near-term flow predictions at river and stream sites across the US, linking the extensive work of the United States Geological Survey's (USGS) National Water Quality Assessment Project with that of …

Hydrologic Micro Services, Rajbir Parmar, Chris Knightes, Deron Smith, Kurt Wolfe, Mike Galvin, Josh Koblich, Jan Sitterson, John M. Johnston, Tom Purucker

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed a collection of micro services called Hydrologic Micro Services (HMS) for building hydrologic and water quality modeling workflows. HMS components are available as RESTful web services as well as desktop libraries. An HMS component may have multiple implementations addressing varying levels of underlying physical process details and assumptions. HMS components can be used in desktop and web-based workflows. A workflow can call into a specific implementation of an HMS component depending upon the details suitable for the problem statement being addressed by the workflow. Building a workflow from HMS components enables modelers …

Development Of A Decision Support Tool To Improve Binational Water Quality Planning In The Lower Rio Grande/Río Bravo, Roger Miranda, Alexander Sun

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Development of a Decision Support Tool to Improve Binational Water Quality Planning in the Lower Rio Grande/Río Bravo

Roger M. Miranda¹ and Alexander Sun²

Hidden text: The abstract may be included at the discretion of the supervisor.

We describe the development of a decision support tool designed to facilitate and enhance collaborative binational decision-making efforts associated with integrated transboundary water quality planning and management in the Lower Rio Grande/Río Bravo. The Lower Rio Grande Water Quality Initiative Decision Support System (LRGWQIDSS) is the result of a multidisciplinary effort to integrate qualitative social science research, geospatial analysis methods water …

Multiplatform Model Integration Framework Of Jrodos - Decision Support System For Off-Site Nuclear Emergency Management, Ievgen Ievdin, Dmytro Trybushnyi, Wolfgang Raskob, Tim Müller, Oleksandr Pylypenko, Oleksandr Mykhalskyi, Mark Zheleznyak

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Decision Support Systems for off-site emergency management in the case of a nuclear accident should integrate, among others, real-time monitoring systems around a Nuclear Power Plant, regional GIS information, source term databases and geospatial data for population and environmental characteristics. They should comprise state of the art models to simulate the fate of accidentally released radionuclides in air, water, vegetation, and soil to estimate exposure of the population via all relevant exposure pathways. The real-time online decision support system RODOS is being developed under the auspices of the European Commission’s RTD Framework programs since 1992 to achieve the above-formulated objectives. …

Mint: Model Integration Through Knowledge-Powered Data And Process Composition, Yolanda Gil, Kelly Cobourn, Ewa Deelman, Chris Duffy, Rafael Ferreira Da Silva, Armen Kemanian, Craig Knoblock, Vipin Kumar, Scott Peckham, Lucas Augusto Carvalho, Yao-Yi Chang, Daniel Garijo, Ankush Khandelwal, Deborah Khider, Minh Pahm, Jay Pujara, Varun Ratnakar, Maria Stoica, Binh Vu

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Major societal and environmental challenges require forecasting how natural processes and human activities affect one another. Model integration across natural and social science disciplines to study these problems requires resolving semantic, spatio-temporal, and execution mismatches, which are largely done by hand today and may take more than two years of human effort. We are developing the Model INTegration (MINT) framework that incorporates extensive knowledge about models and data, with several innovative components: 1) New principle-based ontology generation tools for modeling variables, used to describe models and data; 2) A novel workflow system that selects relevant models from a curated registry …

Automated Data Discovery, Retrieval, Manipulation, And Publication Using Python, Tethys, And Hydroshare, Scott D. Christensen, Dharhas Pothina, Aaron Valoroso, Kevin Winters

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Most environmental modelling efforts have significant data needs, which can present technical challenges and distract from the primary modelling objectives. These challenges include finding relevant data sources, retrieving large amounts of data, performing data transformations, and finally storing and sharing results. This presentation describes the tools being used and developed at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) to address these challenges. These tools include (1) Quest, an extensible Python library for searching various local and public data providers, automating downloading, performing various data filters (or transformations), and finally, publishing the data to data repositories, (2) Data Depot, …

A Computational Framework For Interoperating Uncertainty Quantified Social System Models, Charles R. Ehlschlaeger, Olaf David, James D. Westervelt, Yanfeng Ouyang, Jeffrey A. Burkhalter, Natalie R. Myers, Francesco Serafin, David A. Patterson, Yizhao Gao, Liqun Lu

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Accurate uncertainty modelling of social activities is impossible using available geographic information data and typical geographic information system algorithms due to the Uncertain Geographic Context Problem (UGCoP). UGCoP worsens when data as vague or obsolete, competing social models are available, and parameter values are not fully known. This research reduces UGCoP by explicitly representing uncertainty in input data, algorithms, and visualization tools using Monte Carlo methods. Rich contextual social information is retained by storing dozens of demographic attributes from surveys and censuses of all people in the study area. To include this detail requires large-scale modeling involving demographic and land …

Towards A Semantic Approach For Environmental Timeseries Data Fusion, Argyris Samourkasidis, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Environmental timeseries acqusition, integration and transformation into a consistent data format is becoming more and more challenging in the Internet of Things era, but also for managing legacy model data files. To date, data transformation from diverse sources into one data format requires significant efforts to tackle semantic heterogeneity. In this work we present a declarative approach for environmental timeseries data transformation using semantics. We use a template to annotate environmental data files with terms from a vocabulary. We demonstrate how a reasoner may be employed to resolve synonyms across different vocabularies. This enables to annotate each data file once; …

Solar Energy Potential Assessment For Entire Cities - A Reusable And Scalable Approach, Sukriti Bhattacharya, Ulrich Leopold, Christian Braun, Francesco Bongiovanni

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The recent technological advances in massive geospatial data collection assessing both the temporal and spatial dimensions of data add significant complexity to the data analysis process, provides new dimensions for data interpretation. Accordingly, geographical information systems (GIS) must evolve to represent, access, analyze and visualize big spatiotemporal data in a scalable integrated way. Often, sharing and transferring of such information through deep-dive and automated analysis cause scalability challenges at the software level that impacts the overall performance, throughput, and other performance parameters. In this paper, we demonstrated the whole implementation explaining some practical steps to scale solar irradiation calculations for …