Geoinformatics toolset for integrated river basin management (IRBM) of the Saale River, Thuringia, Germany

In the joint research project "Development of an Integrated Methodology for the Sustainable Management of River Basins - The Saale River Basin Example", coordinated by the Centre of Environmental Research (UFZ) in Germany, concepts and tools for an integrated management of large river basins are developed and applied. The ultimate objective of the project is to contribute to the holistic assessment and hydrological benchmarking for water resource planning, as required by the European Water Framework Directive (EFD). The study presented here deals with (1) the refinement of a regionalization approach adapted for integrated basin modeling and (2) the implementation of a river basin information and modeling system. The approach combines a user-friendly basin disaggregation method that preserves the catchment's physiographic heterogeneity, with a process-oriented hydrological basin assessment for scale bridging integrated modeling. The well-tested regional distribution concept of Hydrological Response Units (HRU) will provide the spatial modeling entities for process-oriented and distributed simulation of the vertical and lateral hydrological transport processes. Based on their topological network structure improved modules have been developed to describe the lateral fluxes between them and towards their associated channel segments. This methodical enhancement will be applied to the river basin of the Saale (A = 23179 km(2)) and validated by a nested catchment approach, which allows multi-response-validation and estimation of uncertainties of the modeling results. The integration of simulation models describing the different stakeholder activities (reservoirs, agriculture, consumption by urban settlements and industry) in such a complex basin system is realized by coupling various modeling approaches within a well-defined model framework system. The latter is interactively linked with a comprehensive geo-relational database (DB) serving all research teams involved in the project. This interactive linkage is a core element comprising an object-oriented, internet-based modeling framework system (MFS) for building interdisciplinary modeling applications and offering different analysis and visualization tools.