ECO-GEOWATER Euro Lab Course

Title: "GIS and Water Domain"

This is the EUROLABCOURSE of the project, grounded on a practical approach of application-oriented presentations and of introduction to the main characters of meaningful implemented projects. These presentations aim at giving concrete demonstration of the support that GIS can offer to the issues that raise in the water field as tools for collection, processing, analysis, synthesis and display of Geographical Information.
GIS are even more important in the current perspective of the catchment approach, where the integrated management of water resources is a crucial element.

Considering the increasing usability of GIS, this event is planned to actually demonstrate and teach the technical issues previously discussed during the Conferences and the Workshops through practical applications and exercises.

The aim is to train young researchers about the practice of GIS as scalable information systems, interoperable with software for water environment modelling, both for feeding the models with territorial data input and for viewing the information coming from Decision Support Systems and simulation models.

In the above outlined application oriented perspective GIS will be approached by different points of view as:

• repository for environmental information and for data mining from historical archives;
• support to new methodologies for the investigation of water resource balance at a catchment scale as well as of pollutant agents propagation;
• integrated system offering a tool for fast decision making and simulation of different scenarios.

The EUROLABCOURSE develops then considerations about the role of GIS and GI in the water application field (as structured by the ECO-GEOWATER Working Groups) as explained in the following scheme:

• introduction about the GIS concepts and structures and about the fundamental issues of Geomatics;
• general overview on methodologies and requirements for carrying out a GIS project;
• examples of interoperability of GIS through hydraulic, hydrological and environmental software;
• presentation of GIS as tool to carry out meaningful projects in different fields of the water domain (e.g. floods and water cycle management);
• introduction to GIS key-fuctions and recommendations for a right use of the tool;
• introduction to the checklist method and examples of application;
• tutored development of meaningful exercises related to meaningful GIS projects and concerning the three ECO-GEOWATER Working Group fields.  The exercise development, even in the limited available time, will outline some fundamental issues already mentioned in the checklist presentation, such as:
  - user requirements, analysis of the tasks, scenarios and best use of typical GIS functions in water domain application;
  - perspective of integrated approach linked to the concept of Catchment Information Systems;
  - the role of operators in the design of GIS applications.
• outline of the possibilities and requirements arising by the web technology and the current trend for the implementation of webGIS;
• presentation of some GIS practical applications e.g. related to the requirements of a data model for the management and classification of distribution networks or to the implementation of a Decision Support System for the integrated water management;