Riparian ecosystems are required to be preserved to achieve the good ecological status. The Water Framework Directive (WFD 2000/60/EC) specifically supports the assessment of new management tools that allow the European Member States to achieve the good ecological status of the river related ecosystems. Within several approaches, a dynamic riparian vegetation distributed model (CASiMiR-vegetation), with a time step of one year, has been selected as a useful first-step tool to achieve the WFD requirements. The model has been implemented into three river reaches with different climatic and hydrologic settings, located in three European countries. Common bases were established in the model set-up. The model was calibrated independently in the Kleblach reach (Drau River, Austria), the Ribeira reach (Odelouca River, Portugal), and the Terde reach (Mijares River, Spain) with simulation periods of 8, 11 and 41 years respectively. The parameters values and the results were comparable between the different countries. The calibration performance achieved high correctly classified instances (CCI ≈ 60%). Additionally, weighted kappa values ranged from 0.52 to 0.66 in distinguishing riparian succession phases. The model behaved similarly in the validation, even offering better results in most cases. This work demonstrates the applicability of this model in This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF version following peer review of the article: García-Arias A., Francés F., Ferreira T., Egger G., Martínez-Capel F., Garófano-Gómez V., Andrés-Doménech I., Politti E., Rivaes R., Rodríguez-González P.M. (2013). Implementing a dynamic riparian vegetation model in three European river systems. Ecohydrology, 6(4):635-651. doi: 10.1002/eco.1331, which has been published in definitive publisher-authenticated form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Sustainable drainage systems are an alternative and holistic approach to conventional urban stormwater management that use and enhance natural processes to mimic pre-development hydrology, adding a number of wellrecognized, although not so often quantified benefits. However, transitions towards regenerative urban built environments that widely incorporate sustainable drainage systems are "per se" innovative journeys that encounter barriers which include the limited evidence on the performance of these systems which, in many countries, are still unknown to professionals and decision makers. A further important barrier is the frequently poor interaction among stakeholders; key items such as sustainable drainage systems provide collective benefits which also demand collective efforts. With the aim of overcoming such innovation-driven barriers, six showcase projects (including rain gardens acting as infiltration basins, swales and a green roof) to demonstrate the feasibility and suitability of sustainable drainage systems were developed and/or retrofitted in two cities of the Valencian region of Spain as a part of an European project, and

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This paper presents the performance of a number of sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) in the city of Xàtiva in the Valencia Region of Spain relatively soon after their construction. The systems studied comprise two roadside swales, one detention basin receiving runoff from one of the swales and one green roof to a school. The SuDS were installed under an EU LIFE+ project intended to demonstrate their practicability, application and behaviour under Mediterranean rainfall conditions. Most of the systems installed were in new developments but the green roof was retrofitted to a school within Xàtiva which is a dense urban area. Full flow monitoring was undertaken and spot samples were taken to give a preliminary assessment of water quality performance. The early results presented in the paper demonstrate the effectiveness of the systems under typical Mediterranean conditions which comprise intense rainfall from September to December and little or no precipitation at other times of the year. It is concluded that SuDS can be effectively introduced in the Mediterranean region of Spain.

The present research develops a systematic application of a selected family of 11 well-known design storms, all of them obtained from the same rainfall data sample. Some of them are fully consistent with the intensity–duration–frequency (IDF) curves, while others are built according to typical observed patterns in the historical rainfall series. The employed data series consists on a high-resolution rainfall time series in Valencia (Spain), covering the period from 1990 to 2012. The goal of the research is the systematic comparison of these design storms, paying special attention to some relevant quantitative properties, as the maximum rainfall intensity, the total cumulative rainfall depth or the temporal pattern characterising the synthetic storm. For comparison purposes, storm duration was set to 1 hour and return period equal to 25 years in all cases. The comparison is enhanced by using each of the design storms as rainfall input to a calibrated urban hydrology rainfall–runoff model, yielding to a family of hydrographs for a given neighbourhood of the city of Valencia (Spain). The discussion and conclusions derived from the present research refer to both, the comparison between design storms and the comparison of resulting hydrographs after the application of the mentioned rainfall–runoff model. Seven of the tested design storms yielded to similar overall performance, showing negligible differences in practice. Among them, only Average Variability Method (AVM) and Two Parameter Gamma function (G2P) incorporate in their definition a temporal pattern inferred from empirical patterns identified in the historical rainfall data used herein. The remaining four design storms lead to more significant discrepancies attending both to the rainfall itself and to the resulting hydrograph. Such differences are ~8% concerning estimated discharges.