Optimization of River and Lake Monitoring Programs Using a Participative Approach and an Intelligent Decision-Support System

We developed a holistic intelligent decision-support system (IDSS) to provide decision-support for all steps in planning, managing and optimizing water quality monitoring programs (WQMPs). The IDSS is connected to a previously developed database, Enki(TM). The IDSS integrates tacit and explicit knowledge on WQMPs to standardize decision making and to make decisions transparent and transferable. The optimization features of the IDSS were tested on a lake and a river WQMP from two case studies in Canada. We illustrate how the IDSS provides decision support to understanding the underlying rationale of the existing WQMPs, validating and storing data, selecting optimization procedures proposed in the literature, applying the optimization procedures and finalizing the optimization procedure. We demonstrated that the IDSS/Enki(TM) is necessary to take and document decisions during all phases of a WQMP to obtain a clear idea of when and why changes are made and determine actionable tasks in the optimization process.