A Pragmatic Cycle for Ongoing Water Resources Research and Management

Organizations focused on managing water resources are recognizing the need to have tools for literature review, data integration, modeling, and decision support. Decision support systems (DSS) can help to meet these needs because they are aimed at integrating data and knowledge, evaluating management options in terms of organizational objectives and risk, and facilitating multiple-stakeholder decision making where competing objectives and risk preferences must be reconciled. Using the internet, organizations can share the costs and benefits of existing and newly developed information, theories, and technologies among a broad, diverse user group. This paper discusses an approach, based on experience, to developing DSSs through a larger, iterative cycle of ongoing, collaborative environmental research and development. Multiple stakeholders with multiple conflicting objectives need insightful, often novel, models of environmental systems. The answers developed to new research questions contribute to requirements and specifications for new tools and technology, and the technology is then built to facilitate the collaborative management process. Information added at any point can influence the collaborative management-research-technology cycle in both directions.