Models for decisions

There is a huge gap between scientific applications of environmental models and applications needed for decision makers represented by or required from various governmental bodies. While the scientific community might look for the unexplored horizons on project to project basis, governmental bodies certainly need tools to provide consistent answers to managerial questions raised by different policies. However, with today's increasing environmental changes and multiple new questions asked, decision makers are often pushed to look at the same new horizons as the scientific community. This means that there is a great need for sophisticated scientific tools for governmental bodies too. Such a need was identificated in Lithuanian Environmental Protection Agency for water questions. It started its building river modeling system based on the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model a decade ago. The build system integrated cleaning, preprocessing of data, model preparation, running, analyzing results and filling various reports, all in an automatic way. Thus providing not only the possibility to answer complex questions, but also transferability, repeatability and the most important possibility to save a lot of time, which earlier was used up for manual work with spreadsheets. The comprehensive river modeling system as well as automatization with using big data scripting languages Python and R allowed to greatly reduce time and effort required to provide answers for new questions as well. Experience of this decade showed that long term direction for investmenting in the preparation and application of complex scientific tools is crucial with current demands for evidence based policies, put on various governmental bodies by and for decision makers.