Simulation Modeling for Watershed Management

Rating:
Summary: bookmark collection
Review: A very disappointing volume - especially at the price. This non-technical book is little more than an uneven annotated bibliography. Most of the references and, more importantly, the explanations offered, are little more than rehashed summary descriptions of model descriptions found on the net. The coverage is extremely uneven, apparently governed by availability of information on the web. While emphasizing watershed management with frequent superficial reference to GIS, the book provides no meaningful treatment of developments in distributed parameter hydrologic modeling, the USGS National Hydrography dataset, or ESRI's own GIS-based hydrologic modeling tutorial and scripts. The book has several chapters that are 5 or fewer pages in length, with distracting typos and mangled syntax. My impression is the book started as a fairly generic outline or brief notes from a talk, that were unevenly fleshed out by browsing the web. Self-described as an introduction to spatially explicit simulation modeling for watershed managers and students, the volume is utterly mis-targeted. Generic simplistic figures accompany trite descriptions of data structures that are too esoteric for a student or watersehd manager and too simplistic for a programmer. While there are many useful links collected in one place, this volume is best viewed as an interesting collection of bookmarks for someone web surfing the search phrase "watershed modeling"