ABSTRACT
Nowadays, there is a growing recognition on the need to integrate wetlands as important elements within the context of a river basin management. This integration should not be accomplished only at the modeling level but also at the decision making stage. A case study within a European-sponsored project has been selected as a pilot study to conduct a methodology. It is the Abras de Mantequilla, a Ramsar site, located in the middle part of the Guayas River Basin (34000 Km2) in Ecuador. Since a specific feature of this location was poor data availability, this imposed a default limitation on the attainable complexity of the modeling tools. Not only quantitative (modeling framework) but also qualitative (expert elicitation) ways were employed as complementary approaches to facilitate the decision making process. To this end, a Decision Support System for a tropical wetland – river catchment was developed. The DSS took into account the different objectives of the stakeholders as well as several ecological services (management axes) provided by the wetland.
