User interface tool

The goal of the PAEQANN project was to develop general methodologies, based on advanced modelling techniques, for predicting structure and diversity of key aquatic communities under natural and man-made disturbances. This allowed the detection of the significance of various environmental variables that structure these aquatic communities. These have been shown to reveal predictable changes due to natural variability and human disturbances. Natural conditions are described as undisturbed by human activities and man-made disturbances are defined as various pollutants, discharge regulation etc. Such an approach to the analysis of aquatic communities made it possible to: 1. set up robust and sensitive ecosystem evaluation procedures that will work across a large range of running water ecosystems throughout Europe; 2. point out the cause and effect relationships between environmental conditions (physical, chemical, due to management actions) and certain relevant aquatic communities (diatoms, macroinvertebrates, and fish) and subsequently, - to predict biocenosis structures in disturbed ecosystems, taking into account all the relevant ecological variables, 3. test ecosystem sensitivity to disturbances, and 4. explore specific actions to be taken for the restoration of ecosystem integrity. The long-term aim of these investigations was therefore to help to define strategies for conservation and restoration of ecosystems, compatible with local and regional development, and supported by a strong scientific backup. The development of these general methodologies allowed the: 1. provision of predictive tools that can be easily applied to define the most effective policies and institutional arrangements for resource management; 2. application of the most effective and innovative techniques (mainly Artificial Neural Networks) to identify problems in ecosystem functioning, resulting from ecosystem degradation from human impact, and to model relevant biological resources; 3. full exploitation of existing information, reducing the amount of field work (that is both expensive and time consuming) needed in order to assess the health of freshwater ecosystems; 4. exploration of specific actions to be taken for restoration of ecosystem integrity, 5. promotion of collaboration among scientists of different interested countries and research fields, by encouraging collaboration and dissemination of results and techniques. This is why the structure of the software developed in the PAEQANN project is presented here, as well as indications as to how the software is working.