TFM-ext tool for the groundwater vulnerability assessment within LandSupport project

Geo-Spatial Decision Support Systems (S-DSS) can be usefully employed to support the acquisition, management, and processing of both static and dynamic data (e.g., daily climate), data visualization, and computer on-the-fly applications in order to perform simulation modelling all potentially accessible via the Web. S-DSS are becoming more popular by providing operational tools to a large community of end-users and policy-makers for a sustainable landscape management (i.e. for both agriculture and environmental protection) at different spatial and temporal scales.

The scope of this work is to present the implementation of the extended Transfer Function Model (TFM-ext) – described in a companion abstract presented in the same session – as an operative tool for the groundwater vulnerability assessment within the larger S-DSS developed for LandSupport H2020 project (https://www.landsupport.eu).

The tool allows to simulate the mean travel times of a generic solute at different spatio-temporal scales (from the local to the regional scale), considering different land uses.

In particular, operatively, the end-user can evaluate the filtering capacity of the soils, by: i) defining the region of interest; ii) defining the simulation period; iii) choosing between 6 different land use scenarios (bare soil, alpha-alpha, maize, vine, olive and wheat) or consider his/her own management scenario; iv) defining the depth of interest at which evaluate the solute arrival.

The outputs are i) the mean travel times that the input solute (given as a fertilizer concentration related to the land-use scenario) takes to reach the defined depth and ii) the quantity of the input solute that reaches the defined depth after one year from its injection.

The latter information is then associated to the filtering capacity of the soil, which are thus classified according to the percentage of input mass arrived after one year.

The model was implemented as open source Java application, following the standard of the flexibility to changes and to future expansions, of the optimized computational demand and parallelization, required by the project.

Three local scale cases are available at the moment (Telesina Valley-IT, Marchfeld-AT and Zala County-HU). Future developments will aim to apply TFM-ext towards larger European spatial extent areas (e.g. regional scales). Furthermore, future develoments  will aim to support selected implementations of Water Framework and Nitrates directives, especially with respect to the systematic required mapping revision of Nitrate Vulnerable Zone and the adoption of best practice.