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The Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC implemented by the European Union established as the main objectives to achieve a "good ecological and chemical status" of the surface water and a "good quantitative and chemical status" of groundwater bodies. One of the major pressures affecting water bodies comes from the use of pesticides and their potential presence in the water ecosystems. For this purpose, the reliable determination of pesticides and their transformation products (TPs) in natural waters (both surface and groundwater) is required. The high number of compounds potentially reaching the aquatic environment makes extraordinary difficult, if not impossible, to investigate all these compounds even using the most powerful analytical techniques. Among these, liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry is emphasized due to its strong potential for detection and identification of many organic contaminants thanks to the accurate-mass full spectrum acquisition data. This work focuses on wide-scope screening of many pesticides and their TPs in surface water and groundwater samples, collected between March and May 2017, in the Júcar River Hydrographical Basin, Spain. For this purpose, a home-made database containing more than 500 pesticides and TPs was employed. Analyses performed by liquid chromatography coupled to quadrupole-time of flight mass spectrometry (LC-QTOF MS) allowed the identification of up to 27 pesticides and 6 TPs. The most detected compounds in groundwater were the herbicides atrazine, simazine, terbuthylazine, and their TPs (atrazine-desethyl, terbumeton-desethyl and terbuthylazine-desethyl). Regarding surface water, the fungicides carbendazim, thiabendazole and imazalil, the herbicide terbutryn and the TP terbumeton-desethyl were also detected. These results illustrate the wide use of these compounds (in the present or in the recent past) in the area under study and the vulnerability of the water bodies, and are in accordance with previous findings in other water bodies of the different Spanish Hydrographic systems., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Droughts are one of the gravest natural threats currently existing in the world and their occurrence and intensity might be exacerbated in the coming years due to climate change. The severe impacts that droughts cause to inland water resources and to the associated socio-economic activities justify the continuous monitoring of the drought. The case study presented shows a practical application of a distributed drought monitoring system implemented in a real river basin district, the Júcar River Basin District (43,000km 2 ), where drought periods of marked intensity have occurred historically and the climate ranges from humid in the north to semiarid in the south. Five drought indices have been applied: Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI) for meteorological drought; Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and a new soil moisture index (HI), for edaphic drought; Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for the vegetation activity; and Spanish Status Index (SI), for the operational drought. All indices are standardised to compare them. The relationship between the standardised operational drought index SI and the long-term meteorological indices, SPI-12 or SPI-24, show that in a medium size basin the concept of "prolonged drought" required by the European Commission under the Water Framework Directive could be defined by the use of accumulated precipitation indices. The number of months to be accumulated depends on the size of the basin and the water management system properties. In large basins, such as the Júcar river basin (22,000km 2 ), there are significant deviations due to the spatial distribution of the drought. The use of a unique aggregated indicator could hide a significant drought in a specific area, or on the other hand show a non-real drought. Evolution of drought indices for each water management system must be accompanied by spatially distributed drought maps to better understand the drought status and its evolution., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

When the regime of a river is not perennial, there are four main difficulties with the use of hydrographs for assessing hydrological alteration: i) the main hydrological features relevant for biological communities are not quantitative (discharges) but qualitative (phases such as flowing water, stagnant pools or lack of surface water), ii) stream flow records do not inform on the temporal occurrence of stagnant pools, iii) as most of the temporary streams are ungauged, their regime has to be evaluated by alternative methods such as remote sensing or citizen science, and iv) the biological quality assessment of the ecological status of a temporary stream must follow a sampling schedule and references adapted to the flow- pool-dry regime. To overcome these challenges within an operational approach, the freely available software tool TREHS has been developed within the EU LIFE TRIVERS project. This software permits the input of information from flow simulations obtained with any rainfall-runoff model (to set an unimpacted reference stream regime) and compares this with the information obtained from flow gauging records (if available) and interviews with local people, as well as instantaneous observations by individuals and interpretation of ground-level or aerial photographs. Up to six metrics defining the permanence of water flow, the presence of stagnant pools and their temporal patterns of occurrence are used to determine natural and observed river regimes and to assess the degree of hydrological alteration. A new regime classification specifically designed for temporary rivers was developed using the metrics that measure the relative permanence of the three main phases: flow, disconnected pools and dry stream bed. Finally, the software characterizes the differences between the natural and actual regimes, diagnoses the hydrological status (degree of hydrological alteration), assesses the significance and robustness of the diagnosis and recommends the best periods for biological quality samplings., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Water planning and the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) represent the best way to help decision makers to identify and choose the most adequate alternatives among other possible ones. The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Water (SEEA-W) is displayed as a tool for the building of water balances in a river basin, providing a standard approach to achieve comparability of the results between different territories. The target of this paper is to present the building up of a tool that enables the combined use of hydrological models and water resources models to fill in the SEEA-W tables. At every step of the modelling chain, we are capable to build the asset accounts and the physical water supply and use tables according to SEEA-W approach along with an estimation of the water services costs. The case study is the Jucar River Basin District (RBD), located in the eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula in Spain which as in other many Mediterranean basins is currently water-stressed. To guide this work we have used PATRICAL model in combination with AQUATOOL Decision Support System (DSS). The results indicate that for the average year the total use of water in the district amounts to 15,143hm(3)/year, being the Total Water Renewable Water Resources 3909hm(3)/year. On the other hand, the water service costs in Jucar RBD amounts to 1634 million € per year at constant 2012 prices. It is noteworthy that 9% of these costs correspond to non-conventional resources, such as desalinated water, reused water and water transferred from other regions., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Intensive groundwater development is a common circumstance in semiarid and arid areas. Often abstraction exceeds recharge, thus continuously depleting reserves. There is groundwater mining when the recovery of aquifer reserves needs more than 50years. The MASE project has been carried out to compile what is known about Spain and specifically about the south-eastern Iberian Peninsula and the Canary Islands. The objective was the synthetic analysis of available data on the hydrological, economic, managerial, social, and ethical aspects of groundwater mining. Since the mid-20th century, intensive use of groundwater in south-eastern Spain allowed extending and securing the areas with traditional surface water irrigation of cash crops and their extension to former dry lands, taking advantage of good soils and climate. This fostered a huge economic and social development. Intensive agriculture is a main activity, although tourism plays currently an increasing economic role in the coasts. Many aquifers are relatively high yielding small carbonate units where the total groundwater level drawdown may currently exceed 300m. Groundwater storage depletion is estimated about 15km(3). This volume is close to the total contribution of the Tagus-Segura water transfer, but without large investments paid for with public funds. Seawater desalination complements urban supply and part of cash crop cultivation. Reclaimed urban waste water is used for irrigation. Groundwater mining produces benefits but associated to sometimes serious economic, administrative, legal and environmental problems. The use of an exhaustible vital resource raises ethical concerns. It cannot continue under the current legal conditions. A progressive change of water use paradigm is the way out, but this is not in the mind of most water managers and politicians. The positive and negative results observed in south-eastern Spain may help to analyse other areas under similar hydrogeological conditions in a less advanced stage of water use evolution., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

One of the major difficulties in water planning is to determine the water availability in a water resource system in order to distribute water sustainably. In this paper, we analyze the key issues for determining the exploitable water resources as an indicator of water availability in a Mediterranean river basin. Historically, these territories are characterized by heavily regulated water resources and the extensive use of unconventional resources (desalination and wastewater reuse); hence, emulating the hydrological cycle is not enough. This analysis considers the Jucar River Basin as a case study. We have analyzed the different possible combinations between the streamflow time series, the length of the simulation period and the reliability criteria. As expected, the results show a wide dispersion, proving the great influence of the reliability criteria used for the quantification and localization of the exploitable water resources in the system. Therefore, it is considered risky to provide a single value to represent the water availability in the Jucar water resource system. In this sense, it is necessary that policymakers and stakeholders make a decision about the methodology used to determine the exploitable water resources in a river basin., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

This paper describes two different GIS models - one stationary (GeoImpress) and the other non-stationary (Patrical) - that assess water quantity and quality in the Júcar River Basin District, a large river basin district (43,000km(2)) located in Spain. It aims to analyze the status of surface water (SW) and groundwater (GW) bodies in relation to the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) and to support measures to achieve the WFD objectives. The non-stationary model is used for quantitative analysis of water resources, including long-term water resource assessment; estimation of available GW resources; and evaluation of climate change impact on water resources. The main results obtained are the following: recent water resources have been reduced by approximately 18% compared to the reference period 1961-1990; the GW environmental volume required to accomplish the WFD objectives is approximately 30% of the GW annual resources; and the climate change impact on water resources for the short-term (2010-2040), based on a dynamic downscaling A1B scenario, implies a reduction in water resources by approximately 19% compared to 1990-2000 and a reduction of approximately 40-50% for the long-term (2070-2100), based on dynamic downscaling A2 and B2 scenarios. The model also assesses the impact of various fertilizer application scenarios on the status of future GW quality (nitrate) and if these future statuses will meet the WFD requirements. The stationary model generates data on the actual and future chemical status of SW bodies in the river basin according to the modeled scenarios and reflects the implementation of different types of measures to accomplish the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive and the WFD. Finally, the selection and prioritization of additional measures to accomplish the WFD are based on cost-effectiveness analysis., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)