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Nature‐based solutions, such as temporary storage areas (TSAs), are increasingly implemented within natural flood management strategies to mitigate flooding and soil erosion by attenuating surface runoff during storm events. However, guidance on optimising site‐specific TSA designs for runoff attenuation remains limited, and no existing approach comprehensively evaluates TSA effectiveness across multiple flood mitigation metrics. This study addresses these gaps by introducing the TSA Design Optimiser Tool (TSA‐DOT), a decision support tool for designing and optimising TSAs as effective nature‐based solutions for runoff attenuation, contributing to flood mitigation. The tool evaluates TSA performance using five flood mitigation metrics: storage efficiency index, mean retention time, peak flow attenuation, peak flow reduction, and changes in peak flow travel time. It incorporates site‐specific data such as topography and potential storage capacity, soil infiltration rates, and design storm events. Users can prioritise and customise flood mitigation metrics, making the tool suitable for a wide range of catchment settings. When applied at two agricultural TSA sites in northeast Scotland, the tool identified the importance of optimising storage‐to‐drainage relationships for effective runoff attenuation and highlighted the need for increased storage capacity or drainage adjustments under extreme storm events or limited soil infiltration. TSA‐DOT provides practical guidance for using TSAs as part of flood risk management, with integration potential into catchment‐scale hydrological models for scalable, site‐specific applications. TSA‐DOT is a decision support tool that optimises nature‐based solution designs for flood mitigation. It evaluates multiple design combinations using site‐specific inputs and five flood mitigation metrics, highlighting the critical balance between storage capacity and drainage rate for effective runoff attenuation under extreme storm events.

Setting There is a multitude of health equity tools but little guidance on how to effectively use these tools in public health nursing practice. In BC, public health nurses who are certified in sexually transmitted infection care utilize guidelines authorized by the nursing regulatory body. Intervention As part of the Equity Lens in Public Health (ELPH) research project, an assessment of the nursing guideline, Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) Assessment Decision Support Tool , was undertaken using the Assessing Equity in Clinical Practice Guidelines health equity assessment tool. The chosen tool is intended for use by health care providers, is broadly applicable to clinical practice guidelines, can be used retrospectively, and falls within the category of equity checklists and audits. Outcomes Overall, the tool was useful in assessing the inclusion and omission of an equity focus in the guideline. However, there were several challenges: the identification of an appropriate health equity tool; the absence of an evaluation of the chosen tool; the tool’s focus on chronic disease versus communicable disease; and the difficulty of obtaining client perspectives. Implications For an improved equity lens in the STI Assessment Decision Support Tool , future revisions should be equity focused and include perspectives from affected populations, an emphasis on the determinants of health that perpetuate inequities for populations who experience a disproportionate burden of STI, information on provincially available resources, and service delivery models that improve timely and equitable access to treatment and care.

In an era when many water systems worldwide are experiencing water stress regarding water quantity and quality, water reuse has received growing attention as one of the most promising integrated mitigating solutions. Nevertheless, the plethora of technologies and their combinations available, as well as social, economic, and environmental constraints, often make it complex for stakeholders and especially decision makers to elicit relevant information. The scope of the current study is to develop a decision support tool that supports pre-feasibility studies and aims at promoting water reuse and building capacities in the field. The tool developed currently encompasses 37 unit processes combined into 70 benchmark treatment trains. It also contains information on water quality standards and typical wastewater qualities. It estimates the removal performances for 12 parameters and the lifecycle costs including distribution. The tool and all underlying data are open access and under continuous development. The underlying systemic approach of the tool makes it intuitive also for users with limited prior knowledge in the field to identify most adequate solutions based on a multi-criteria assessment. This should help to promote water reuse and spearhead initiates for more detailed feasibility and design commissioning for implementation of water reuse schemes.

Fenech, D.; Deidun, A., and Gauci, A., 2020. A spatial prioritisation exercise for marine spatial planning implementation within MPA MT105 of the Maltese Islands. In: Malvárez, G. and Navas, F. (eds.), Global Coastal Issues of 2020. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 95, pp. 790-796. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Anthropogenic maritime drivers exert pressures on ecological components, including assemblages of high conservation importance as Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadows and maerl beds. These drivers also influence and interact with each other and can generate user-to-user conflicts, which traditionally have justified the need for a holistic Marine Spatial Planning approach. Through the use of the Driver Pressure State Impact Risk (DPSIR) framework and related decision-support tools, we generated both cumulative marine habitat vulnerability maps and cumulative marine user-user conflicts maps within MPA MT105 of the Maltese Islands. These maps are intended to serve as decision - support tools for national policy- makers given that Malta is required to deliver its management plans for some of its marine Natura 2000 sites by the end of 2019.

GOWARE (transnational Guide toward an Optimal WAter REgime) represents a Decision Support Tool (DST) developed to support the implementation of innovative Best Management Practices (BMPs) for drinking water protection and flood/drought risk mitigation. The tool is one of the main outputs of the PROLINE-CE Project, an EU project funded within the Interreg Central Europe (CE) Programme (2014–2020). The aim of this paper is illustrating the design and the methodological approaches proposed for the operative development of the tool. Furthermore, the paper provides the results of a number of tests carried out to evaluate the understandability of the analysis’s processes and assessing the stakeholders’ acceptance. Specifically, GOWARE-DST has been developed for supporting single users or groups of users in the decision-making process. The tool has been provided with a catalogue of 92 BMPs to handle water issues in different land use contexts. The selection of practices suitable for addressing the specific user’s requirements is supported by the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a method that allows filtering a subset of BMPs by accounting for the relative importance that the user assigns to each characterizing criterion. GOWARE-DST represents an innovative tool for supporting users at different levels of planning (operational and strategic) by promoting sustainable land and water management and defining long-term governance activities.

A Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) plays a central role in maritime traffic safety. Regulations are given by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and Guidelines by the International Association of Marine Aids to Navigation and Lighthouse Authorities (IALA). Accordingly, VTS facilities utilize communication and sensor technologies such as an Automatic Identification System (AIS), radar, radio communication and others. Furthermore, VTS operators are motivated to apply Decision Support Tools (DST), since these can reduce workloads and increase safety. A promising type of DST is anomaly detection. This survey presents an overview of state-of-the-art approaches of anomaly detection for the surveillance of maritime traffic. The approaches are characterized in the context of VTS and, thus, most notably, sorted according to utilized communication and sensor technologies, addressed anomaly types and underlying detection techniques. On this basis, current trends as well as open research questions are deduced.