Other Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Experiences With A Serious Online Game For Exploring Complex Relationships Of Sustainable Land Management And Human Well-Being: Landyous, Ralf Seppelt, Romina Martin, Alexander Finger, Christin Henzen, Martin Linder, Katrin Pietzsch, Andreas Werntze, Ute Zander, Jule Schulze

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Land is a limited resource. Its use for one purpose excludes other uses. Addressing the issue of human appropriation of natural resources thus requires understanding of a variety of complex feedbacks between decisions on land use and ecosystem services. The complexity is caused by a large number of mostly nonlinear feedbacks between management strategies, productivity, environmental quality, human well-being, consumption and many other aspects of land use. Here, we present LandYOUs: an educational online game, which aims at explaining and illustrating various options and feedbacks of sustainable land management (SLM) to the interested public, students and stakeholders. The game gives …

Stakeholder Engagement In Public Natural Resource Management, Lindell Ormsbee, Jim Kipp, Anna Hoover

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The management of public natural resources can be challenging, especially in the face of diverse stakeholders with varied interests and concerns. In most cases, decision-makers lack sufficient data from which to assess the range, intensity, and convergence of community preferences. Traditional attempts to acquire such information from public meetings frequently are constrained by a format that too often permits a few individuals to monopolize or co-opt sessions for their own purposes or agendas. Such experiences in past public meetings subsequently drive community expectations for future meetings, frequently resulting in decreased attendance and a less representative participant base. Consequently, regulators or …

We C.A.N. Do It: Actively Engaging Stakeholders In Modelling, A. Micheal S. Sheer

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Active stakeholder participation is critical when trying to find local solutions to environmental problems. When consultants present externally developed suggestions, stakeholders often distrustful. This paper describes a novel methodology that encourages and stakeholder participation, trust, and cooperation while developing model-informed solutions to such issues. This process is illustrated by examples from recent work in the Bow River Basin in Alberta, Canada.

The Computer Aided Negotiation process (CAN) is a form of Computer Modelling for Decision Support developed by Hydrologics Inc. and facilitated with OASIS software. It has 4 main stages intended to keep stakeholders engaged and clear difficult problems in …

Sustainability Indicators For Water Resource Assessment: Compatibility And Data Requirements, Marina G. Erechtchoukova, Peter A. Khaiter

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The concept of sustainability emerged as a solution to natural resource depletion and deterioration under significant anthropogenic impacts imposed on the natural environment. Recognition that changes in the state of natural environments have complex causes and even more complex consequences motivated the development of a structured approach to managing environmental issues and their interrelations with political and economic processes. Sustainable development can be achieved through management activities which are based on sustainable decisions. To evaluate a decision's sustainability, it is necessary to evaluate and analyse values of current and future welfare outcomes. The latter requires quantitative methods, simulation models, and …

A Model Component For Simulating Co2 Emissions Growth, Gleb Alexandrov

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Development of comprehensive Earth System models requires a variety of model components related to human feedbacks. Among them are the model components relating energy use to climate change and resource availability. Simulations of the changes in usage of various fuels over the next 25 years are essential for predicting the pathways of CO2 emission reduction needed for climate change mitigation, and considered as a challenging aspect of Earth system modelling (Erickson et al, 2009). Here I present a model component for simulating CO2 emission growth that takes into account the effect of non-renewable resource availability on the rate of consumption …

Automating Data-Model Workflows At A Level-12 Huc Scale In A Distributed Computing Environment, Lorne Leonard, Christopher J. Duffy

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The HydroTerre web services provide the Essential Terrestrial Variable (ETC) datasets to create common hydrological models anywhere in the continental United States (CONUS). These services allow web users to download data for their own purposes in their own computing environment. The datasets are provided using standard Geographic information System formats and the data transformation is dependent on the users’ own needs, goals, and computing environment. In this article, we demonstrate the feasibility of automating data-transformation workflows for United States Geological Survey level-12 Hydrological Unit Codes (HUC-12) to be consumed in hydrological models. The Penn State Integrated Hydrological Model (PIHM) is …

An Approach For Encapsulating Fortran Coded Models Into A R Package, Carlos A. Hölbig, Willingthon Pavan, Jose M. C. Fernandes, Angela Mazzonetto, Tiago Zortea

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Computer crop simulations have been successfully used around the world, specially, towards the understanding and transferring of agricultural technology. However, as soon as crop models become more complex, increases the difficulty to use, maintain, expand and improve these models. Most of crop simulation models are written in Fortran, a well-established computer language especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. However, Fortran has severe limitations regarding integration, interoperability and data visualization. In this study, an approach for wrapping a Fortran coded model into a R package is presented using a free and multiplatform software. By encapsulating the simulation engine in …

Extending Existing Models To Capture Vegetation Response To Extreme Weather Events: The Modextreme Project, Gianni Bellocchi, Francisco J. Villalobos, Marcello Donatelli, Ole B. Christensen, Oscar Rojas, Roberto Confalonieri, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis, Irina Carpusca, Claudio O. Stöckle

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Extreme weather events are combinations of meteorological drivers that exceed certain thresholds and occur with low frequency, negatively impacting human living conditions and economic systems including agriculture. The three-year European project MODEXTREME (started on November 1st, 2013) aims at improving the predictive capability of biophysical crop and grassland simulation models under extreme weather conditions (mainly high/low temperatures and water deficit/excess). Existing modelling solutions can be improved with re-usable software libraries to capture extreme weather impacts. Estimates from existing and new modelling solutions will be compared on a variety of datasets and evaluated with respect to medium-term trajectories of future climate …

Reimplementation And Reuse Of The Canegro Model, Tommaso Stella, Valentina Pagani, Caterina Francone, Sevim Seda Yamaҫ, Giacomo Finotto, Simone Bregaglio, Enrico Ceotto, Roberto Confalonieri

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Model reuse can be limited by software design, which often forces third parties to completely rewrite new versions of existing models before adapting them to new needs. This tendency removes resources from the development and improvement of models, and from the extension of their domain, leading to the proliferation of software having many different implementations of the same algorithms. A component-oriented paradigm allows these limitations to be overcome, facilitating massive model reuse and extension. This study presents the application of component-oriented principles to the reimplementation of the sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.) model Canegro (DSSAT v4.5) in a framework-independent component …

Planning Modeling In The Klamath River Basin - Usefui Tools For Stakeholders, Nancv Parker, Kristin White, Lee Traynham, Jason Cameron

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The Klamath River Basin, straddling the borders of Oregon and California, has been the scene of both substantial controversy and cooperation during the last twenty years over the analysis of water management solutions to address a broad range of interests. Threatened and endangered fish, trust obligations to four Native American tribes, the viability of irrigated agriculture, wildlife refuges on the Pacific Flyway, and a regional source of hydropower are all important aspects of the operation of this small basin. The U. S. Bureau of Reclamation has played a central role in conducting modeling studies to serve multiple management processes. A …

Calsim Modeling Of Proposed San Joaquin River Basin Flow Standards, Thomas W. Fitzhugh

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Water resources system modeling was conducted using the CalSim II San Joaquin River model to evaluate streamflow standards proposed during the current update to the 2006 Water Quality Control Plan for the San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Estuary (Bay-Delta Plan Update). Phase I of the Bay-Delta Plan Update will select and implement State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) standards for San Joaquin River instream flows and salinity. CalSim II is a monthly model of reservoir and water system operations in the Central Valley of California. The first modeling effort was to analyze a proposed agreement between the Bureau of Reclamation …

Modeling Potential Environmental Impacts Of Deep Aquifer C02 Sequestration, Nigel W. T. Quinn

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

A promising measure for mitigating climate change is to store large volumes of C0₂ captured from large point-source carbon emitters in deep saline aquifers. In vulnerable systems, water resources impacts of large-scale C0₂ storage need to be evaluated and assessed before industrial­ size storage projects get under way. In California's southern San Joaquin Basin the land surface uplift caused by large C0₂ injection projects land deformation could have the potential to create reverse flow along certain canal reaches, or to reduce canal deliveries to agricultural land and managed wetlands. The impact of C0₂ storage on shallow …

Predicting Impact Of Natural Calamities In Era Of Big Data And Data Science, Carol K. Joseph, Sunil Kakade

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Every year thousands of lives and millions of dollars are lost during natural catastrophic events. Data scientists have recognized the value of employing data mining techniques for evaluating these events to assist in understanding trends, predicting future disasters, and assessing vulnerability of populations. The goal of such analysis is to prepare governments for emergency response and relief efforts as well as to formulate strategies for future disaster mitigation. In addition, increasing pressures from a growing world population further emphasize the need for governments to seek viable solutions for balancing human needs with environmental constraints. Identifying populations vulnerable to environmental calamities …

Discovering Comprehensible Hydrogeological Profiles In The Margarita Island's Aquifers Including Post-Processing In A Data Mining Process, Conti Dante, Gibert Karina

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Groundwater wells are one of the most important water resources in the world. Control and management of these resources are of high importance due to the implicit need of water as the main resource for life. This research focuses on a hydrogeological analysis with clustering, which is one of the most popular data mining methods, including In the classical data mining scheme, last step corresponds to the effective production of knowledge. In this paper, special focus on that part is done, by means of post-processing tools. The main goal is to discover prototypical profiles from the acquifer Pedro González in …

Graph Clustering Based On Social Network Community Detection Algorithms, Enrique Campbell, David Ayala-Cabrera, Joaquín Izquierdo, Rafael Pérez-García

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Graph network clustering has been an important field of investigation in recent years with a wide spectrum of applications, including environmental, genetic and engineering studies. There are two main types of applications; their suitability depends of the modeling context. Cases where the number of subdivisions is a priori known are tackled with different techniques than those where such number is not clearly evident. The second falls within the field of community detection, which has been broadly studied by social network scientists. Traditionally, community detection in graphs has been tackled by means of hierarchical clustering, which groups nodes based on their …

Practical Identifiability Analysis Of Environmental Models, Stefano Marsili-Libelli, Michael B. Beck, Philip Brunner, Barry Croke, Joseph Guillaume, Anthony Jakeman, John Jakeman, Karel Keesman, Hans Stigter

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Identifiability of a system model can be considered as the extent to which one can capture its parameter values from observational data and other prior knowledge of the system. Identifiability must be considered in context so that the objectives of the modelling must also be taken into account in its interpretation. A model may be identifiable for certain objective functions but not others; its identifiability may depend not just on the model structure but also on the level and type of noise, and may even not be identifiable when there is no noise on the observational data. Context also means …

Pre-Processing Techniques Applied To Automatic Taxon Identification On Fish Otoliths, Ramon Reig-Bolaño, Pere Marti-Puig

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This paper analyzes the characteristics of a rotation-invariant Feature space to be used in a classifier of fish otoliths, it is compared to two other Feature spaces, one with raw data and another with transformed data (using the Elliptic Fourier Descriptors EFD). Otoliths are found in the inner ear of fish. Their shape can be analyzed to determine sex, age, populations and species, and thus they can provide necessary and relevant information for ecological studies. The Automatic Taxon Identifier (ATI) is used to classify fish otoliths directly from a query image and is implemented on-line in a Public Database. This …

A Modeling Framework For Oceanic Basins Under Double Exposure, Christian Mullon, Gorka Merino, Jose Fernandez, William Cheung, Manuel Barange

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Oceans stand under double exposure to global warming and of economic globalization. This generates anxieties and contributes to the need for specific governance. A first expression lies in the needs for integrated representations allowing a collaborative development of scenarios. Main challenge here lies in finding, in these representations, a balance between realism and abstraction admissible by all participants.

In this talk, we present modeling framework that has been designed to build scenarios about the possible futures of an oceanic basin. The principle lies in using a network model in which nodes correspond to fish stocks, specialized fleets, farming systems, trade …

Modelling Climate Change Adaptation Using Cross-Impact Analysis: An Approach For Integrating Qualitative And Quantitative Data, Johan Veltmeyer, Oz Sahin

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Inherently, 'Climate Change Adaptation' is a complex issue requiring use of a range of methods and data, which involves many stakeholders. In this, often quantitative models relying on quantitative data are used to explore and predict the likely impact of a changing climate, and to evaluate adaptation alternatives. While such models do provide useful information, in addressing such complex issues they clearly need more data. In reality, quantitative data are not readily available, or too expensive to obtain. Therefore, to provide a more comprehensive insight, qualitative and quantitative data needs to be collected from a variety of stakeholders with different …

Using Remote Sensing And Radar Met Data To Support Watershed Assessments Comprising Iem, Keewook Kim, Katie Price, Gene Whelan, Mike Galvin, Kurt Wolfe, Paul Duda, Mark Gray, Yakov Pachepsky

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Meteorological (MET) data required by watershed assessments that comprise Integrated Environmental Modeling (IEM) have traditionally been provided by land-based weather (gauge) stations; although these data may not be most appropriate for describing adequate spatial and temporal resolution if the MET stations are too few, too far away, or operating improperly. To complement land-based stations, remote sensing and radar satellite data are being increasingly used in obtaining synoptic data with the spatial and temporal resolution required for site-specific and/or event-based assessments. This study compares and contrasts the viability of automating the use of radar satellite data and land-based gauge stations to …