SEMINAR: Improving water quality through improved prediction

Water quality and aquatic ecology models are widely used to facilitate management and scientific understanding of catchments, lakes, wetlands, rivers, estuaries and marine systems. But how good are these models? In recent years, numerous authors have argued that they have failed to keep up with advances in scientific understanding, remain highly disciplinary, and fail to adequately assess or reign in uncertainty. Here I will discuss current research trends and outline the need for new approaches able to deal with complexity, non-stationarity and uncertainty in future scenarios. Emerging data streams from new monitoring technologies, improved processing of existing sources such as satellite observations, citizen science initiatives, open-access monitoring data initiatives and real-time data portals all hold the potential to improve the way we run and assess environmental models. But the question remains: how can these diverse datasets be brought together in way that allows us to advance model accuracy and more constructively inform management?