•The percentages of provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services were found to overshadow ecosystem services, such that generation of goods and values in the studied wetlands are in jeopardy.•Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), turbidity, conductivity, Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), Dissolved Oxygen (DO), concentrations of heavy metals and salts were measured as indicators of water quality.•Many significant correlations were observed among these parameters, and many of these parameters exceeded regulatory limits and known limits indicative of healthy wetlands.•For instance, Pb in Wetland 0.09ppm far exceeded the safe limit (0.01–0.05ppm), while turbidity in Wetland 21.12 was too high to sustain fish populations.•Wetland water temperature was statistically different from COD, Pb and Cl− (p≤0.05).•Water pH was significantly correlated (p≤0.01) with Cd.•TDS was found significant (p≤0.01; p≤0.05; p≤0.1) correlation with conductivity, Ca2+, BOD, percent of salinity and DO.•The conductivity was increased (p≤0.01) with increasing of Ca2+.•COD was significantly different (p≤0.1) with Pb, Cd and Cl−.•BOD was increased with the increasing of Ca2+ (p≤0.05) and F− (p≤0.1).•DO was increased significantly (p≤0.1) with the increasing of Ca2+.•Lead (Pb) and F− was significantly (p≤0.1) correlated between each other.•The potassium ion (K+) was significantly (p≤0.05) correlated with Cl−.•At present ecosystem services in the studied wetlands are at extreme risk due to their connectivity with polluted water.
•A generalized modeling system contributes greatly to water planning and allocation in Texas.•A new process has been created for agencies, stakeholders, and scientists to establish environmental flow standards.•The modeling system has been expanded to incorporate the new environmental flow standards.
•Overall, 29.0% drinking water samples had Escherichia coli thus were not potable for human.•52.0% of water samples from wells and 43.0% from spring were positive for E. coli.•Only 20% of Tap water samples had E. coli.•Piped water supplies were 3.8times less likely to be faecal contaminated than other water sources.•Only, 72.1% of drinking water supplies complied with World Health Organization standards.
•There is great spatial variation in water quality across the Loxahatchee River watershed.•Freshwater river regions had consistently elevated nutrient concentrations over the last decade.•The Loxahatchee River is strongly phosphorus limited, possibly indicating anthropogenic activity.•Chlorophyll a had the greatest number of exceedances of any established water quality criteria.•Most river regions exhibited nutrient concentrations below EPA/DEP’s numeric nutrient criteria.
•The stakeholders’ perspectives about water management policy are examined.•The critical factors associated with sustainable water management are identified.•The SWOC-AHP technique is used for grouping and prioritising the critical factors.•New scientific requirements for water management research are proposed.
•Developed a physical approach to identify Landsat bands for specific pollutants.•Developed GA-based models relating pollutant concentration and Landsat reflectance.•Developed GA-models relating surface reflectances of Landsat and MODIS.•Conducted Monte-Carlo based uncertainty & sensitivity analysis for eight water quality parameters.•Real-time water quality monitoring and mapping is carried out for a typical river reach.
•Factor analysis and discriminant analysis were used for assessing roof runoff quality.•Roof runoff quality was identified based on roof materials and runoff sampling time.•FA identified three factors in water quality parameters.•DA selected phosphate and nitrate as the most sensitive parameters in roof runoff.•Water quality indicator has significant correlation with most air quality parameters.
•Contribution to solve the challenging Bagmati river pollution of Kathmandu Valley.•Scenario based modeling and analysis for sustainable urban development.•Revelation of inefficient practice of discharging untreated sewage.•Policy recommendation to maintain ecologically healthy urban development.
•Land conservation on military training lands requires adapted management approaches.•Bayesian Networks provide means of integrating disparate data to optimize the decision-makingprocess.•Under simulated systems, the authors demonstrate the value of Bayesian Networks in support of military land management conservation.
•History provides facts, storylines and lessons useful for future governance.•The sanitary revolution offers examples of both successes and failures.•Future water technology depends on governance aiming sustainable development.•Ancient sanitation techniques are still valuable in the future in some cases.
•Emerging contaminants are emerging to be critical issues in sustainability of watershed systems.•There is a need for comprehensive approaches at source, transfer, and fate levels.•Watershed system-level strategies are critical to develop sustainable solution to reduce these effects.
•Experiments to adapt the SWAT parameters such as HSG and CN were demonstrated.•The SWAT model simulated successfully mitigation options for water flow regulation.•The simulated mitigation options fulfilled at least two sustainability pillars.•These mitigation options should be adopted as one criterion in the plantation certification.
•Discussions on hot water topics took place amongst Belgian water professionals.•The demand for water-related IT knowledge is increasing.•There is a need for improved trans-disciplinary education.•There is a need for improved cross-sector communication.
•Interchanges of land use classes are analyzed using FORE-SCE projections in 2011–2091.•Land use for year 2091 under three scenarios are incorporated in SWAT modeling.•Low-input agriculture with increased hay/pasture cultivation improves water quality.
•Current extent of riparian land was included in SWAT set-up.•Median riparian filtering efficiency declined from local to regional scale.•Streambank stabilization was important in large reaches (Strahler’s order>3).•Current riparian land reduces sediment yields at the Danube mouth by 480kt/y.
•An integrated modeling system for multi-objective optimization of agricultural BMPs.•BMPs considered: nutrient management, constructed wetlands and filter strips.•Evaluation of optimal BMP scenarios in terms of cost and nutrient loss reductions.•Nutrient management was found to be the best cost-saving BMP practice.
•Environmental conditions that favor the thriving of M. tuberculata in the dam.•High population of M. tuberculata indicates that this dam may be organically polluted.•Population is predisposed to diseases transmitted by this freshwater snail.
Implementing sustainability in water management: Are we still dancing in the dark?Since sustainability is a key focus of our journal, we would like to motivate authors to keep in mind and consider in their studies and papers some of the following issues.In the first version of most papers that were submitted over the past years to this journal, sustainability was not or rather vaguely mentioned.Therefore, we considered it our duty to shed some light on the topic of sustainability, particularly in relation to water systems' analysis and management.The topic of sustainability is far from new.For example, in the National Environmental Policy Act, the United States of America already committed to sustainability, by declaring it a national policy ''to create and maintain conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony, that permit fulfilling the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations.Most of the progress has been made in the context of social and economical aspects for the considered region.In the past, food, health and safety were key issues, while environmental and ecological aspects were often taken for granted.This trend started to change due to some environmental disasters in different places in the world, during which human health was endangered and more environmental awareness started to grow, leading to more complex and challenging definitions of sustainability.About 20 years ago, Costanza and Patten (1995) wrote that there was much discussion at these days about how one ''defines" sustainability and it seems that this discussion is still going on, not only in particular on its definition, but rather on what could and should be done (Brandt et al., 2013).We hope we bring together some relevant general concepts that offer a source of inspiration to reflect on by authors who submit their manuscripts to this journal.We like to stimulate our authors to state how their work is related to these concepts and how they tackle the challenge of implementing sustainable water management.Although many definitions have been formulated (Singh et al., 2012;Goethals, 2013), both at a very general and specific level, sustainability is usually based on a simple principle as recently defined and used by the EPA in the National Research Council's report 'Sustainability and the US EPA': Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment.To pursue sustainability is to create and maintain the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony to support present and future generations.Several concepts became very popular and even standards to define and implement sustainability, such as life cycle analysis tools, mass balance approaches (Thaler et al., 2013), integrated environmental models and decision-support systems (McIntosh et al., 2011) as well as the currently highly popular ecosystem services analysis tools boom of methods (Arthington et al., 2010;Horwitz and Finlayson, 2011;Volk, 2013).Each of these methods has particular advantages and disadvantages, and more general or specific applications at a detailed and specific level (Muñoz et al., 2013), or rather broad scale and holistic level, such as Vannevel ( 2013).In addition to the challenge of finding the appropriate methods and tools for a relevant sustainability assessment, it still remains a challenge for stakeholders and managers to define what needs to be done, and how improvement can be achieved.Additionally, as a result of drastic changes in the global setting during the last decades, the implementation of sustainability concepts faces several new challenges:Climate change: The impact of climate change will increase dramatically in the absence of adequate safeguards.There is a strong need to promote an integrated and sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystems (Palmer et al., 2008) and take mitigation and adaptation action in keeping with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2013).Demographic change/distribution/population growth: Demographic changes like aging and shrinking population, low birth rates, changing family structures and migration shrinking in some places of the world (like Europe, Eurostat, 2015) and dramatic growth of population and production in other places of the world combined with unsustainable consumption
