How much do we know about planning ecohydrological management actions? [What did we lern in the first phase of the Project?]

In this paper a review of the lessons learned in the past phase of the ecohydrology project are presented from the hydrologist’s (environmental engineer’s) points of view. The authors believe that so far the ecohydrological programme remained mostly an aquatic-ecological one, without making much use of hydrological and environmental engineering knowledge, which would be required to end up with really working ecohydrological planning tools for the integrated management of water resources. The objective of the paper is to launch, provoke debates and discussions, with the special regard to drawing up the tasks of the next phase of the ecohydrological programme. The basic questions are: what is the role of hydrologists in ecohydrology and how to bridge the still existing gaps of the approaches of ecologists and hydrologists? The ways and means of solving this problem are discussed down to some of the very details of quantifying processes, such as retention rates of nutrients or the forecasting of the ecological (eutrophication) state of standing waters. The paper ends with a list of tasks offered for the next period of the ecohydrological programme.