Large Regional and National Watershed Modeling to Support Water Quality Benefits Decision Making

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to submit research for a Special Issue of Water on large, regional- to national-scale watershed and water quality modeling to support decision making to improve and protect water resources. National policies and decision making regarding the economic costs and benefits of best management practices and other actions are inherently challenging due to their scope and necessary models and supporting databases. While there is a long history of modeling sub-watershed to river basin extents, the complexity, time, and resources required to model watershed and water quality dynamics at large regional (i.e., multiple river basins) and national extents has limited scientific output. The need to make decisions regionally and nationally has led federal agencies to invest in developing and evaluating models such as the soil and water assessment tool (SWAT), spatially referenced regression on watershed attributes (SPARROW), hydrologic and water quality system (HAWQS), and the national water model (NWM), just to name a few examples. While these models have contributed valuable information, decision makers and the research community would both benefit from further research and application of watershed and water quality models as components of integrated assessments that include economic valuation, sensitivity, and uncertainty assessment for scenario evaluation. These findings are consistent with the US interagency vision for integrated hydroterrestrial modeling (IHTM) to address the complex dynamics of hydrological, climatic, and biophysical systems, including land use/land cover, agriculture, and built infrastructure, as well as societal, economic, and decisional environments. IHTM addresses the federal priority water challenges of nutrient loading, water availability, and flooding, obstacles in data and modeling, and prior barriers to such an integrated effort (workshop report).

Water quality valuation is a key component of integrated assessments to support water resource management, and research on economic valuation can shed light on the types of water quality models necessary to inform decision making. Recent efforts to further research on water quality valuation and broader integrated assessment from federal agencies and the academic community include the US Environmental Protection Agency’s STAR grant program on water quality benefits, the US Department of Agriculture’s workshop on Applications and Potential of Ecosystem Services Valuation within USDA, and Cornell University’s annual workshop on the Social Cost of Water Pollution. We will be coordinating this Special Issue with a session at the International Society for Ecological Modelling Global Conference this year in October, consistent with the theme of “Ecological Models for Tomorrow’s Solutions”.

The goal of this Special Issue is to coordinate and elevate research into large, regional, and national watershed and waterbody modeling, crucial components of integrated assessment approaches, to support national decision making on the costs and benefits of water resource protection. We invite contributions on watershed and water quality modeling and economic valuation as components of integrated assessments, with topic areas that include:

• Improvements to modeling specific water quality parameters in large regional and national water resource models;
• Improvements to modeling specific actions to improve water quality, including best management practices implemented in large, regional, and national models;
• Innovative approaches and application of existing approaches to translate water quality parameters into decision endpoints that people understand and value;
• Implementation of cloud-based models and database workflows for national integrated water quality benefit assessments.

Dr. John M. Johnston
Dr. Joel Corona
Dr. Rajbir S. Parmar
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• watershed modeling
• water quality modeling
• decision support
• valuation
• national scale
• regional scale