Decision support tool for integrated water monitoring networks design and evaluation

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Over the last century, the status of Canadian inland waters (lakes, rivers, groundwater) has been monitored by various types of water monitoring networks called surface water networks, groundwater networks, water quality networks, and precipitation networks including snow monitoring networks. The data and information collected by these networks are the essential water information used for all water related activities and policy decisions. This includes, to name a few, enhancing aquatic ecosystems services, ensuring secure community water systems, flood and drought forecasting, source water protection, and determining environmental flow to protect aquatic ecosystems health while optimizing industrial/agricultural water use, etc. Therefore, enhancing the quality and reliability of the water information will have direct benefits on all the water related activities and decision-making. However, this requires optimal water monitoring networks properly designed to collect adequate information in terms of space-time resolution and reliable in terms of representativeness and level of uncertainty. So far, this has been a very challenging task across Canada because of the large size of most Canadian watersheds. Many watersheds are still without monitoring stations or poorly gauged because of the high cost and/or the poor design of the monitoring networks. The objective of this research is to develop a decision support tool for the design of optimal integrated water monitoring networks that are less costly and can provide more adequate and reliable water information. This is now achievable by resorting to emergent information processing technologies namely dual entropy analysis' and 'hierarchical Bayesian optimization' techniques. The proposed decision support tool will be highly useful for determining the optimum number of water monitoring stations and their appropriate locations across Canada, which was one of the main recommendations of the Auditor General 2010 Report on the monitoring of Canadian water resources. The proposed decision support tool holds the promise to reduce cost, enhance the quality and reliability of water information, which will be highly beneficial to all water related sectors in Canada.