The aims of the Catchment Management for Water Quality project are to provide better access to data and modelling through this Catchment Management Modelling Platform. In particular we encourage you:
- to explore approaches to enable more integrated modelling to deliver holistic solutions for multiple pollutants, services & policies;
- to support the development of a community of practitioners, policy makers and scientists to develop future questions and encourage joint working.
Whether you are curious about our Community of Practice, need access to water quality models, want to browse CaMMP model and data catalogues, or are interested in our case studies demonstrating the advantages of integrated modelling, CaMMP resources are freely available.
Catchment Management for Water Quality
Who’s doing what?
Many government agencies, water industries and NGOs are concerned with improving the management of our land and water resources. Many challenges result as there are many competing demands by agriculture, water industries, tourism and nature conservation on these resources. With the many pressures and threats accumulating on land and water resources, planning future management is complex and difficult. To help make these complex decisions, the diverse and often fragmented data and specialist models spread around the research community need to be brought together, tested and linked so problems and possible solutions can be explored and tested in a more integrated way.
This cannot happen without the community also coming together encouraged to share common problems and solutions, including their data and modelling tools. One of CaMMP’s prime missions is to provide a mechanism for that communication and sharing. The list below contains links to other organizations across all sectors also involved in Catchment Management for Water Quality and the provision of other benefits and services.
The Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) is a community-led approach that engages people and groups from across society to help improve our precious water environments. The CaBA embeds collaborative working at a river catchment scale to deliver cross cutting improvements to water environments.
The UK Water Partnership, launched in February 2015, brings people and organisations together to address the key challenges facing the water sector, and catalyse action to benefit the UK economy and improve UK and global water security.
The Environmental Information Platform (EIP) provides enhanced access to UK CEH's key data holdings via web-based tools. It enables users to visualise and interrogate the diverse environmental datasets held by UK CEH. The platform enables researchers, policy makers and the public not only to discover UK CEH data easily but also to access, analyse, interrogate and visualise the data through a single platform.
Agrimetrics is a Big Data Centre of Excellence for the Agri-food industry. A partnership between Rothamsted Research, The University of Reading, National Institute of Agricultural Botany and SRUC, Scotland’s Rural College, Agrimetrics brings together expertise and capabilities in data science, smart analytics, bioinformatics, translational research and knowledge exchange in crops, livestock and food, and sustainability.
WaterInnEU, a H2020 research project, aims to create a marketplace (supported by a portal) to promote the dissemination and enhance the exploitation of EU funded activities, including information and communication models, tools, protocols and policy briefs related to water.
The Catchment Change Management (CCM) Hub is a place where people who are interested in the wellbeing of their local river/s and wider water environment can share understanding and make links across river catchments. It complements the Rivers Trust Catchment Based Approach site by concentrating on facilitating the transfer of research findings into practice.
The Sustainable Intensification Research Platform (SIP) is a multi-partner research programme comprising farmers, industry experts, academia, environmental organisations, policymakers and other stakeholders. Funded by Defra and the Welsh Government, the platform is exploring the opportunities and risks of Sustainable Intensification (SI) from a range of perspectives and landscape scales across England and Wales.
Demonstration Test Catchments (DTC) is a UK government-funded project designed to provide robust evidence regarding how diffuse pollution from agriculture can be cost-effectively controlled to improve and maintain water quality in rural river catchment areas.
The Ecosystem Knowledge Network is a UK network for people who want to put the environment at the heart of decision-making. The network promotes the holistic and inclusive management of the environment as at asset by involving local people in decision-making, considering the environment as a system, and valuing the services nature gives us.
Water UK. We bring people together to create better policies for the future if water.
Scottish Government, Rural Payments and Services, Catchment Management for Water Quality. The aim of the Environmental Co-operative Action Fund is to help deliver landscape scale action by helping to fund the facilitation and management costs of such projects.
Why a Platform is needed
Access and integration
Land and water managers are facing a complex array of regulatory and societal pressures to meet the challenge of securing greater food and water security without damaging our natural capital and the flow of ecosystem services. For Instance, the idea of Sustainable Intensification (SI) - a means of increasing food production without increasing (or ideally reducing) the environmental footprint of agriculture including diffuse pollution - has emerged as a powerful response to the challenges facing the agricultural industry and the science community. As a complex interaction of internal biogeochemical, ecological and hydrological processes are the fundamentals of catchment science, SI and diffuse pollution issues require representation of these interactions in models and tools if they are to be useful to the wide array of policy, industry and NGOs operating in this area.
The challenge to the community is to develop new integrated data-model systems which are robust, useable and available to the breadth of the user community in the field, while also adequately reflect the mix of abiotic and biotic processes and outcomes which underpin key ecosystem services. There is an opportunity to exploit work ongoing in this field from fundamental biogeochemical and biodiversity research and to exploit the potential opportunities of web-based solutions to enable more integrated community involvement. The primary objective of CaMMP is to provide a forum and platform for the wider community to communicate and engage to create more sustainable, effective and efficient management of catchment resources at the UK scale.
Expertise and experience
The Catchment Management for Water Quality project has assembled a focussed team with direct experience in water quality and catchment management issues and with a track record of managing large community projects:
- a breadth of the community focussed on research, policy and industry capabilities,
- national coverage and holders and users of many core data,
- ownership models and data which are industry standards( e.g. Farmscoper, SAGIS, LCM 2007),
- has long experience bringing together the research and enduser community and negotiating licensing and IPR agreements to develop metamodels and modelling frameworks (e.g. Farmscoper, SAGIS, JULES) for the benefit of the whole community
- developing web-based data and model platforms (e.g. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre; Countryside Survey data portal; EVO Global modelling exemplar)
- international links in the field of integrated modelling (Earthcube; EnSym; SUN SEEA, ESSP etc)
Modelling Tools for my concerns
How can I find modelling approaches for my problems?
Catchment managers face many challenges trying to deliver good water quality amid a complex mix of competing demands. Deciding which modelling tools can help and how they should be used should not be one of the challenges.
The CaMMP community forum, through a series of workshops, examined a wide range of questions related to Catchment Management for Water Quality and consolidated the issues and concerns into four high-level general concerns, each with a subset of more specific issues. These concerns and issues were expressed as the questions below, and were used to define a series of case studies illustrating potential solutions using integrated modelling approaches.
Select the question(s) below that are most relevant to your problems or concerns to identify the CaMMP models and case studies that may help in their solution. Use the other resources on the platform to get more details about those that interest you.
If you know the resources you need for your issues access the CaMMP catalogues.