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Water sowing and harvesting (WS&H), a term adopted from Latin America, is an ancestral process that involves gathering and infiltration (sowing) of rainwater, surface runoff, and groundwater to recover it (harvesting) later and/or elsewhere. The WS&H systems follow the approaches of integrated water resource management, nature-based solutions and the recovery of ancestral knowledge for water management. In this paper, we present some representative types of WS&H in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, and then, we focus on the Paltas Catacocha Ecohydrology Demonstration Site in southern Ecuador as a study case. The recovery of such local ecohydrological knowledge in the study case has made enabled the regulation and retention of water in the aquifers through the restoration of artificial wetlands (cochas) and stream dams (tapes or tajamares). Also, this ancestral way of water management has recently supported and reactivated several biological aspects and human activities. The experience of the Paltas Catacocha site shows that there are more appropriate and sustainable alternatives to gray infrastructure projects for water resources management and denotes the need to study ancestral water and soil management systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research evaluates the performance of water supply utilities operating at the retail level in Portugal concerning asset management practices. The study's main innovative feature is identifying peers and targets to guide improvements in the sector. Reliable data collected by the regulatory authority for water and waste services in Portugal (ERSAR) are employed to design two composite indicators reflecting different dimensions of asset management: operational conditions and management systems. Based on the Data Envelopment Analysis technique, the Benefit-of-the-Doubt model is employed in robust and conditional formulations. The role of the context on utilities' performance is also investigated. The results show that the direct management model is unfavourable concerning developing structured management systems, whilst urban environments favour managerial advancement. Rural and semi-urban environments favour "good" operational results in infrastructures. The pool of peers obtained for each utility and the quantification of targets based on the observed achievements by those peers facilitates the search for industry best practices and promotes continuous improvement. Given the high heterogeneity in asset management performance within the sector, the utility-specific target-setting approach illustrated in this paper can support a regulatory policy review for determining more realistic goals. • Identification of peers and targets of water utilities related to asset management. • Benefit-of-the-doubt composite indicators can assess asset management performance. • Peer identification facilitates decisions to guide continuous improvement. • A utility-specific target setting approach can support regulation in water sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper presents the development and validation of cost functions for different types of assets of water supply systems based on known hydraulic (e.g., flow, pump head, pump power) and physical characteristics of the assets (e.g., volume, material, nominal diameter). The followed methodology is a five-step procedure: 1) database construction and analysis, 2) present cost value calculation, 3) cost function establishment, 4) model specification, and 5) model validation. Cost and infrastructure data from several Portuguese water utilities have been used. Regression models have been used for the cost modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because water is a key at-risk resource, improved water management is essential. In terms of quantity, the two major alternatives in water management can be grouped into: (i) improving efficiency in water use; and (ii) exploring alternative water sources. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) is one of the most promising alternative water sources, since rainwater can easily be collected and used without significant treatment for non-potable purposes. However, the economical viability of these systems is not always assured. This paper examines the most relevant technical and economical issues in designing domestic RWH systems, evaluating the technical feasibility and economical viability of this technology in the particular weather and water use in Portugal. The evaluation is performed for a single-family residence, where the water use pattern was monitored. The precipitation pattern is characterized for two locations in Portugal, Porto and Almada, since they represent two different scenarios for RWH. The RWH and water savings efficiency were assessed and payback period estimated for both cities. It was found that, for an optimum rainwater tank, the water savings potential are similar for both locations, despite the differences in the average annual precipitation. A simple rule for estimating the optimum tank capacity for single-family households in Portugal is proposed. A sensitivity analysis shows an important influence of water fees on the economical viability of RWH systems in single-family houses in Portugal, namely when compared to changes in the consumption pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper models for the first time the ecological status of rivers using BBNs. • Data was integrated to model the effect of multiple stressors in two basins in Denmark and Portugal. • The impact of combined climate and socioeconomic changes scenarios was assessed. • Scenarios demonstrated small impacts on the biological quality elements analysed. • Most of the rivers in both basins will not fulfil the European WFD targets. Freshwater systems have increasingly been subjected to a multitude of human pressures and the re-establishment of their ecological integrity is currently a major worldwide challenge. Expected future climate and socioeconomic changes will most probably further exacerbate such challenges. Modelling techniques may provide useful tools to help facing these demands, but their use is still limited within ecological quality assessment of water resources due to its technical complexity. We developed a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) framework for modelling the ecological quality of rivers and streams in two European river basins located in two distinct European climatic regions: the Odense Fjord basin (Denmark) and the Sorraia basin (Portugal). This method enabled us to integrate different data sources into a single framework to model the effect of multiple stressors on several biological indicators of river water quality and, subsequently, on their ecological status. The BBN provided a simple interactive user interface with which we simulated combined climate and socioeconomic changes scenarios to assess their impacts on river ecological status. According to the resulting BBNs the scenarios demonstrated small impacts of climate and socioeconomic changes on the biological quality elements analysed. This yield a final ecological status similar to the baseline in the Odense case, and slightly worse in Sorraia. Since the present situation already depicts a high percentage of rivers and streams with moderate or worse ecological status in both basins, this means that many of them would not fulfil the Water Framework Directive target in the future. Results also showed that macrophytes and fish indices were mainly responsible for a non-desirable overall ecological status in Odense and Sorraia, respectively. The approach followed in this study is novel, since BBN modelling is used for the first time for assessing the ecological status of rivers and streams under future scenarios, using an ensemble of biological quality elements. An important advantage of this tool is that it may easily be updated with new knowledge on the nature of relationships already established in the BBN or even by introducing new causal links. By encompassing two case studies of very different characteristics, these BBN may be more easily adapted as decision-making tools for water management of other river basins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]