The EU H2020 FREEWAT project: an open source software tool for water resource management

The application of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and water related directives required an increase of monitoring activities on water quantity and quality, determining the availability of a large amount of data and time series. Up to now, such data is not properly exploited. In fact, the use of new technologies dedicated to water management, such as modelling, is still limited among the water authorities. Moreover, the value of using advanced technologies is often diminished by the fact that stakeholders are not actively involved in model development and the lack of participatory approach in using advanced ICT tools for evidence-based decisions constitutes a limit to the application of the water related directives. Indeed, the non-technical aspects of water resource systems (such as societal, political and legal concerns) are recognized as having a fundamental importance to reaching agreed-upon decisions (Soncini-Sessa, Weber & Castelletti, 2007). Also water resource management in agriculture, specially decision and planning in rural basins and sub-basins, would benefit from the use of advanced tools allowing the integration of soil and weather data with hydrological variables describing underground water dynamics