**3.2 Technical adaptability of an AMIS**

434 Environmental Monitoring

interactions of "their own" systems and "their own" decisions which could lead to a revision or adaptation of management decisions (Pahl-Wostl, 2007. Further, this creates the feeling that stakeholders "buy in" into the product, that the monitoring system is "their" and therefore deserves more credibility (McIntosh et al., 2006). According to recent approach, the involvement of stakeholders can be extended to monitoring activities and not only to the design phase. The use of local knowledge enhances the understanding of environmental system, particularly in data poor areas. Moreover, adopting a community-based approach to

Thus the intensive dialogue between science and many different stakeholders offers the opportunity for a mutual development, assessment, enhancement and implementation of new or already existing concepts, methods and tools, and helps improve the quality and acceptance of the decisions that are made. Last not least when using success-stories in management, based on the AMIS design, for the further development and enhancement of

The following criteria, implemented into an AMIS, are indispensable to serve as a learning

1. **Understandability**: for each group of participants one should use "professional" indicators and perception-oriented "public" indicators to support learning processes for

2. **Representativity** in involvement. Regardless of the method used to solicit user groups of the AMIS, every attempt should be made to involve a diverse group of stakeholders or broad audience that represent a variety of interests regarding the issue addressed. While key stakeholders should be invited to the process of indicator formulation, there should be also an open invitation to all interested parties to join the evaluation of the system. This adds to the public acceptance and respect of the results of the AMIS. If a process is perceived to be exclusive, both key members of the decision-making

3. **Scientific credibility**. Although participatory monitoring as it is understood in the AMIS design incorporates values and beliefs, the scientific components of the monitoring system must adhere to standard scientific practice and objectivity. This criterion is essential in order to maintain credibility among all groups, expert-decision-

4. **Objectivity**. The stakeholder community must trust the facilitators of a participatory monitoring as being objective and impartial. In this regard, facilitation by university researchers or outside consultants often reduces the incorporation of stakeholder biases

5. **Understanding uncertainty**. Understanding scientific uncertainty is critically linked to the expectations of real world results associated with decisions made as a result of the modelling process. This issue is best communicated through direct participation in the

6. AMIS' own **adaptability** to incorporate new users groups, changed frameworks and newly gained (quantitative and qualitative) data. The monitoring system developed should be relatively easy to use and up-date by the administrators. This requires excellent documentation and a good user interface. If non-scientist users cannot understand the monitoring system as a source to work with, local decision-makers will

monitoring can promote the public awareness of environmental issues.

community and the wider public may reject monitoring.

into the scientific components of the monitoring system.

not apply it to support real management problems.

makers, scientists, stakeholders, and the public.

the monitoring system, the learning cycle is closed.

tool (cf. McIntosh et al., 2006):

modelling process itself.

both of them

In this section some technical aspects related to the adaptive degree of AMIS are described.

Firstly, AMIS should be flexible and able to incorporate new information and data, of different type and with different formats. Using a relational database (RDBMS) is a sound basis to be open for new information requirements, because it is very flexible and extendable. The information can be well structured and redundancy can be avoided. The user can create new tables and link them to the existing database.

To satisfy the information needs of various user groups according to their knowledge of environmental system behaviour, different types of information for different purposes must be produced. One important aim of the AMIS is to provide the user with various methods and predefined algorithms to produce information. AMIS should provide the user with user-friendly predefined methods and algorithms to produce information, such as data visualisation tools as well as automatically generated information from incoming data.

Fig. 2. Technical components of AMIS.

Monitoring Information Systems to Support Adaptive Water Management 437

This criteria have been used to evaluate the adaptability of the groundwater monitoring

The groundwater monitoring network of the Apulia Region was established in 2006 to meet the wide range of standards set by the water related national legislation adopted in 1999 (Italian Legislative Decree n. 152/1999). Consequently, the monitoring network was designed, realized and finally used in order to produce water quality and quantity information useful to characterize the environmental status of the main regional

The monitoring network has been promoted and financed by the regional offices in charge of the collection, storage and processing of data collected in accordance with relevant regulations. The network design and implementation and the enforcement of the monitoring practices fall within the scope of the project called TIZIANO whose completion

Fig. 3. TIZIANO monitoring design and number of monitoring stations. The process was

The TIZIANO monitoring network is made of more than 600 wells mostly spread within the boundaries of the four main aquifers of the region even if some tens of them have been located within some minor groundwater bodies. About 130 wells have been equipped with automatic probes for continuous measuring of groundwater level. During the last five years hundreds of quality and quantity measures have been made on site and thousands of samples, collected in the wells of the network, have been analyzed in laboratory in order to

composed by two main phases to identify the monitoring stations.

system of the Apulia region (Southern Italy).

groundwater bodies.

is scheduled for the end of 2011.

Another aspect of being flexible and extendable is to provide the possibility to add new modules easily, for instance hydrological or economical models, methods to analyse map layers etc. This kind of flexibility is of interest for developers or advanced users with programming skills. A modular or object oriented software structure is necessary to permit this task.

Taking the above mentioned arguments into consideration the information system is quiet flexible and open to include new information. But it is impossible to foresee what kind of requirements will be demanded from the information system in a few years. Thus, it should be possible to improve, maintain, and extend the software for everybody with programming knowledge. To be "technically sustainable" open source software should be used and local IT experts involved in the development process, particularly, if the software prototype will be produced within a project over a certain period and not by a company. One should emphasise the problem here that after a project has finished, often the developers are not available or not in charge for the product anymore. To facilitate future improvements the AMIS must be equipped with a sound documentation of the source code.
