Towards to a system analytical and modelling approach for integration of ecological, hydrological, economical and social components of disturbed regions

As a consequence of surface coal mining, past landscapes within the Lusatian coal mining region were disturbed (land cover, forest, agro- and other ecosystems, geological material, hydrology), paralleled by strongly changed economic and socio-economic conditions (unemployment, emigration due to slowing down of mining activity in the region). The task is to restore the landscape and to improve the present state of the economic and socio-economic conditions, as well. Consented goal states for both the ecological and economic system in the region and consistent planning and management options (PMO) for such economic sectors, which are linked to natural resources (terrestrial, hydrological), are to be designed. They must be ecologically and economically evaluated, assessed and selected for real implementation. In order to handle such a complex problem, a comprehensive analysis of the whole system with subsequent multiscaled modelling efforts is needed. The final aim is to establish an interactive, effective, sufficiently simple decision support system for the actors in the disturbed region. The future responses of the landscape variables and the economical and social characteristics as an answer to economic sector PMO (e.g. PMO for control in agriculture, forestry, hydrology a.o.) can be approximately calculated, and subsequently evaluated and assessed by such an appropriately tailored simulation and decision support tool. In this study, the complex problem and the ecologic and economic system with its components are analysed and structured. Based on this, principles of stepwise model building and its usage (e.g. in if-than-simulation experiments as scenario analyses of the effects under changing non-modelled political and economical boundary conditions) toward an integrated approach are proposed. In this study, the present state of the disturbed region is described briefly (Section 1), and a rough scheme of the ecological and socio-economic structure of the region ( Section 2) as well as of the structure of the problem, which must be solved ( Section 3) and the role of the models in decision support ( Section 4) is outlined. In Section 5, the tasks of analysing and modelling of the components in the Lusatian coal mining region are derived, and in Section 6, the main steps in module building and its usage are briefly described. Finally, some conclusions are drawn.