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Airborne LIDAR Technology for Sustainable Watershed Management: Red River Basin

Problem Description / Relevance to Water Security: 

Airborne LIDAR measurements principally lead to the highly accurate 3D reconstruction of the landscape and its features. By mounting LIDAR measurement units on an aircraft large areas can be measured relatively quickly and cost effectively. Airborne LIDAR measurements can then be used to reconstruct a bare earth landscape as well as featured landscape which includes vegetation, buildings and other. These landscape reconstructions can then be used for a number of applications such as archeology, water and coastline management, farming, forestry, geology and conservation.

ICT Application / Outcome: 

Southern Manitoba has a long history of flooding events which has led to significant damages in the region over the years. The Red River Valley (RRV) is a disaster hot spot in the United States and a multi-million dollar floodway was built to protect the City of Winnipeg from floodwaters in Canada (see Figure 1). The spring melt of 2011 brought with it simultaneous flooding events in most of Southern Manitoba (Public Safety Canada 2013). The Assiniboine and Souris River Basins which typically do not have excess floodwaters were also gravely affected in 2011.

Environmental Management Plan for the Lake Uromiyeh Ecosystem, Iran

Problem Description / Relevance to Water Security: 

Lake Uromiyeh is shallow (6-8 m deep) and has no outflow, so all the precipitation falling in the basin evaporates either from the land or from the lake itself. The evaporating water leaves the dissolved salts behind. The actual salinity depends on the amount of water in the lake, i.e. the lake level. These circumstances led to the development of a relatively simple ecology, populated by salt-loving organisms at each level of the food chain.

ICT Application / Outcome: 

The principles of integrated water management were applied. The key tool in it was a decision support system (DSS) that combined data from all related fields.

The advantage of using a DSS in integrated water resources management is that it provides the possibility of testing outcomes of different water allocation schemes, i.e. of different scenarios.

The DSS for Lake Uromiyeh incorporated several software tools, comprising four major logical units (Figure 2).

GIS Based Communication Platform for the Sustainable Management of Transboundary Water Resources in Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and Kaliningrad Region (Russia)

Problem Description / Relevance to Water Security: 

Pregolya and the Neman rivers are heavily affected by anthropogenic pressures in all four countries. The lack of basin wide information on pressures and current ecological and chemical status of water bodies is an important issue for the sustainable management in the region. Due to the political situation in the region the sustainable transboundary management of river basins was limited. So far the planning of water resources was usually based only on national data.

ICT Application / Outcome: 

A GIS database consisting of 12 transboundary GIS layers (Table 1) and more than 100 attribute fields was created. The database content is based on national information. The information for different countries was obtained from various sources: official GIS maps, official statistical data, digitized paper maps, reports, literature, etc. The long list of sources meant that the detail level of the map was diverse. The data harmonization was necessary to provide the unified basin wide information layers.

Remote Sensing Based Agricultural Drought Monitoring and Yield Loss Prediction Method

Problem Description / Relevance to Water Security: 

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Global Water Partnership (GWP) have launched a joint Integrated Drought Management Programme (IDMP) in March 2013, to improve monitoring and prevention of one of the world’s greatest natural hazards. GWP is responding to the climate change challenge through a portfolio of programmes and projects aimed at building climate resilience through better water management (Kindler and Thalmeinerova 2012).

ICT Application / Outcome: 

The case study has three important steps, which correspond and relate to each other in hierarchical way.

Airborne Laser Scanning and Aerial Hyperspectral Imaging Technologies in Disaster Management: Hungary, Kolontár Red-Mud Spill

Problem Description / Relevance to Water Security: 

On October 4, 2010 the embankment of the red mud reservoir failed and released a mixture of 600-700 thousand cubic meters of red mud and water. The mud, a byproduct of refining aluminium from bauxite ore, was dangerously alkaline, extremely salty and contained potentially toxic metals like chromium and vanadium. Lower parts of the settlements of Kolontár, Devecser and Somlóvásárhely villages were flooded. Ten people died, and another 120 people were injured. The red mud flooded 800 hectares of surrounding areas.

ICT Application / Outcome: 

Survey and analysis of the effects of red mud disaster-prone area and information service for authorities:

ArcSWAT Application in Basin-Scale Water Security Assessments: Azov Sea Case Study

Problem Description / Relevance to Water Security: 

The current study investigates the change of water supply in the Azov Basin, in particular in the Tsimlyansk reservoir under different land use and climate change scenarios by 2050.

ICT Application / Outcome: 

Spatially-explicit scenarios of climate and land cover changes using datasets of the EnviroGRIDs project were used for assessing water security threats using the SWAT model.

Scenarios were built based on outputs of the Metronamica model, which allows assessing spatial development in the land use depending on external factors and policy measures (RIKS 2005).  The scenarios were based on the storylines proposed by IPCC-SRES (Nakicenovic et al. 2000) corresponding to the different ways of global socio-economic development.

Water in Central Asia Knowledge Base

Problem Description / Relevance to Water Security: 

Given the utmost importance of water resources for economies, people and ecosystems, a lot of water-related scientific and practical activities are taking place in Central Asia. A wealth of smart and locally adapted solutions, methods, and techniques are accumulated in scientific and research institutions. However, the use of these research outputs in practice is inadequate. This is mainly due to limited access to available knowledge and absence of effective knowledge transfer mechanisms.

ICT Application / Outcome: 

To deliver transboundary water security and sustainable water management in Central Asia, SIC ICWC builds on its strengths in the four areas: 1) Research and expert advice, 2) Data and Information, 3) Capacity building, and 4) Communication and Networking. All these areas of activities feed into and make use of a water-related knowledge base, which was developed to make better use of knowledge accumulated from field works, scientific research and water-related projects in Central Asia.