**1. Introduction**

426 Environmental Monitoring

and will allow potentially improving, globally, the water management. However, if this perspective represents a clear benefit both for natural and manmade environments, it request the development of a coherent vision based on a process allowing to integrate the fragmented activities developed until now in the water sector. The ICT solutions will allow this integration process but they have to be coordinated under guidelines and standards which have to be jointly defined by the various actors of the water sectors. Regulating bodies, public services, water utilities and IT producers are invited through organisations like @qua, to engage an active dialog in order to develop a coherent strategy. The suggested approach, based on business processes, represents a solution which has to be extended to all activities and domains of the water sector. It implies a real mobilization of all actors from who have to formalize their processes. Of course this effort requests a maturity in the

The water sector represents a vast area where ICT solutions can be implemented and provide a real improvement. In order to benefit of these solutions, the water sector has to be pro active and structured in order to express needs. This challenging and exciting task will mobilize many professionals from both sectors and will request debates within the society

The @qua thematic network and this work is funded under the ICT Policy Support

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process itself in order to be able to characterize the tasks and their dynamic.

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on choices regarding water and its management.

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**6. Acknowledgment** 

**7. References** 

Decision making in water resources management is widely acknowledged in literature to be a rational process, based on appropriate information and modeling results. Information plays a fundamental role in improving our understanding of the consequences of, and trade-off among, the alternatives in water resources management.

Environmental monitoring networks have the potential to provide a great deal of information for environmental decision processes. Monitoring is widely used to increase our knowledge both of the state of the environment and of socio-economic conditions. Environmental monitoring has demonstrated its capacity within resource management to support decision processes providing knowledge of baseline conditions, to detect change, to establish historical status and trends, to promote long-term understanding or prediction, and to establish the need for, or success of, interventions.

Our knowledge of the complexity of water system processes is increasing, together with our awareness of the uncertainty and unpredictability of the effects of water management on system dynamics. Consequently, the demand for environmental information is growing posing new challenges to monitoring system design. This chapter discusses these new challenges and proposes an innovative monitoring design approach to deal with complexity. The conceptual architecture of an Adaptive Monitoring Information System (AMIS) is proposed. The AMIS properties are used in this work to define a framework to assess the capabilities of current monitoring systems to support water managers to cope with complexity and uncertainty. The framework is used to identify the main limitations and to define the potential improvements of TIZIANO monitoring system, developed to monitor the state of groundwater monitoring in the Apulia Region (South Italy).
