AUTOMATIC ASSESSMENT OF LAKE STATUS USING AN OPEN SOURCE APPROACH: LAKE LUGANO’S CASE STUDY

Abstract

Climate change and human activities are increasingly threatening water resources. In particular sub-alpine lakes are fundamental not only for tourism or other economical activities, but also as a source of water. In this context, there is a strong need to monitor such resources to understand, study and react to known and unknown impacts, so that appropriate mitigation actions can be taken. Unfortunately, although monitoring data already exist for many of these lakes, the information is archived in different formats and servers undermining the full exploitation of data and preventing a more efficient data management. The aim of this work is to improve this situation by implementing a system that integrates and standardizes data coming from different sources. In addition, the system integrates web based tools that estimate lake state indicators using open source software and standard. Thanks to this system, it will be possible to exploit the data potential more fully. This paper focuses on the achievements reached by the research carried out on Lake Lugano in the context of the project SIMILE after two years of work.