Modeling Human–Environment Feedbacks for Sustainable Water Resources Management

Dear Colleagues,

Healthy catchments and rivers provide water that is essential for life on Earth and is a valuable resource not only for food, energy and industrial production, but also for delivering well-being and cultural services. Catchments are tightly coupled systems, relying on feedbacks between natural, social, and technological systems that exist within them. The sustainable management of catchments and their water resources must therefore recognize these interactions in order to ensure the long-term delivery of water services for resilient societies. This is particularly urgent considering the accelerated loss of biodiversity and the certainty of climate change.

Given the complexity of freshwater-related ecosystems and their interactions with people, which give rise to the multiple water services, water resources management decisions have often relied on models. Hydrological models are used to assess water availability in time and space, and water management models support the definition of water allocation and supply strategies. These are sometimes coupled with water quality and eco-hydrological models as well as analytical approaches to account for either environmental dimensions which tend, however, to be oversimplified; other modelling approaches integrate socio-economic factors into environmental processes which are, however, few in number. In order to effectively promote sustainable decision-making, advances in the understanding and modelling of freshwater-related environmental processes and their links to socio-economics and technological advancements should be brought to the current and future literature.

This Special Issue welcomes submissions focusing on new modelling approaches or innovative applications of existing models for sustainable water resources management which explicitly couple different subsystems and represent feedbacks within catchments or river systems in a quantifiable manner.

Models and their application could include (but are not limited to):

• Eco-hydrological, water quality, habitat, and water management models;
• Coupled socio-hydrological integration; or
• Water resources models at a systems level, incorporating feedbacks from environmental requirements as well as social needs.

This Special Issue aims to publish studies that adopt robust approaches (e.g., process-based, artificial intelligence, machine learning) for the representation of feedbacks and trade-offs between human decisions and environmental conditions (e.g., water quantity, water quality, and aquatic biota), upscaled to representative scales for water management (e.g., catchment).

Systematic reviews, reviews, methods, and original research articles are all welcome (see the Instructions for Authors for article types guidelines).

When submitting your paper for evaluation, please clearly specify: (i) how the research fits the Special Issue call and (ii) identify which coupled systems or quantified feedback loops your research addresses.

Dr. Monireh Faramarzi
Dr. Andrea Momblanch
Prof. Dr. Lindsay Beevers
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. Sustainability 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 2400 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.

• Model integration
• Water resources assessment
• Water supply
• Freshwater ecology
• Eco-hydrology
• Water quality
• Ecosystem services