Hydro-economic modelling approaches for agricultural water resources management in a Greek watershed

The combination of economic insights with hydrology and engineering processes offers a more realistic and coherent framework for integrated water resources management (Medellín-Azuara et al. 2009). So far, Hydro-Economic Models (HEMs) have been used mainly for agricultural concerns and water allocation policies (Blanco-Gutiérrez et al. 2013). Comparative studies of HEMs have been carried out using efficiency criteria (Krause et al. 2005). Cornelissen et al. (2013) assessed the suitability of different model types for simulating scenarios of future discharge behaviour in the context of climate and land use change, and Bekchanov et al. (2015) provided a review of HEMs features and applications. But to our knowledge no study has compared the performance of the same model under different conditions, yet. This study presents two different approaches of setting a HEM in Lake Karla watershed, a rural area in Central Greece. The two ways concern different situations of: data availability (a limited-data and a complete-data version), scopes (a preliminary and a complete version) and different desirable results, while their common outputs are compared. The novelties of this study are: the attempt to show how flexible should be the settings of a model (depending on the needs of the desired results and the data availability), and the attempt to provide the optimum approach, in order to express simpler engineering and economic terms to achieve a better local management.