Agricultural water management in a multipurpose scenario

The issue of water resources management requires more approaches in which multiple skills and capacities are nested together (integrated water resources management process), especially when critical situations are taken into account, such as: lake areas and possible climate change scenarios. The various disciplines involved are: climatology, meteorology, hydrology, ecology, environmental science, agricultural science, water resources engineering, socioeconomics, law and public policy. In this context, Decision Support Systems (DSS), applied to the management of water resources, play an essential role since they must allow the different stakeholders and know-hows involved to summarize results and produce decisions on a common and shared basis. The irrigation water use is most common and demanding with respect to other uses and it often enters in competition with other kind of uses for the exploitation of surface water. For this reason a DSS has been studied to support the management of water withdrawals, with particular attention to irrigation use. The Hydrogate Project is a spatial decision support system (SDSS) developed by the University of Perugia and the T4E S.r.l., which is characterized by the integration of hydrological modeling scripts with the capabilities of a GIS system all made available via WEB. So, this WEB-based system, under the control of an administrator, can provide on the one hand the possibility to have a common database of water use and on the other, the possibility to share, with all the stakeholders, this data, results, analysis tools and GIS integration to better assess the available water during the decision-making process.