Download and install a free Acrobat Reader if you cannot open the papers
With increasing pressure, river basin management is evolving as a comprehensive framework for water resource management, land use planning, agricultural development, and environmental protection. This represents an advance from earlier approaches that view the water, power, and transport potentials of river systems more or less independently, with minimal attention to attendant consequences in other sectors. The result is a convergence on integrated river basin assessment and management.
Isotopes provide unique tools to trace fluxes of matter and energy through inter-related river basin processes. Where chemical and physical measurements indicate instantaneous fluxes, isotopes can distinguish contributions from individual sources or record the history of the system over time. These data add an important dimension to our understanding of river basins. An improved understanding of river basin processes can help optimize overall resource management. Improvements in computer hardware and software would also enable the IAEA’s Technical Cooperation (TC) recipients to run the large, complex models needed to represent river systems providing a visual, interactive tool for regional stakeholders to evaluate basin management alternatives.
