Environmental Patterns of Water Management
Bruce K. Ferguson
DOI: 10.2190/G5JK-6CDV-6F5A-P08D
Abstract
Water is managed in a wide variety of ways to fulfill a wide variety of purposes, amidst a wide variety of constraints. This article attempts to provide a framework for understanding what a range of water management steps are trying to do and the approaches available for doing it. The framework is built upon previously suggested concepts of "landscape hydrology," which sees the hydrologie landscape as a combination of surface, soil, groundwater, atmospheric and cultural "mantles" in which different types of hydrologie processes occur. Major aspects of the framework are the types of functions that management steps perform and the types of environments in which they are practiced. Uses of water demand that water have specific characteristics of quality, quantity, time and place. Water management aims to produce those characteristics in water either before use, to make water suitable for designated uses, or after use, to make it suitable for discharge into the environment. Not all management occurs in artificial pipes and tanks. Management makes use of existing processes in unmodified environmental mantles. It also makes use of the mantles' potential capacities for altering water's characteristics. Technologies are media that man interposes to stimulate natural processes to perform closer to demanded levels. Highly developed management systems are analogous to modern agriculture's modification of and interaction with natural soil and plant processes. Thus the means of managing water include symbioses of natural and cultural systems.
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