Practical hydroinformatics : computational intelligence and technological developments in water applications Hydroinformatics has emerged over the last decade to become a recognised andestablished field of independent research activities within the hydrological and environmentalscience communities. Hydroinformatics is not just an application of Informationand Communications Technologies (ICT) to water resources hydraulics hydrology or environment. It strives to provide an amalgamation of water sciencewith modern technologies for the purposes of satisfying social requirements. TheEuropean Geosciences Union (EGU) held its first dedicated session on Hydroinformaticsin 2005 at the Vienna Meeting; that same meeting voted to establish theHydroinformatics Sub Division and Technical Committee (part of the HydrologicalSciences Division). The aim of that original session was to provide an active forumin which to demonstrate and discuss the integration and appropriate application ofemergent computational technologies in a water modelling context. The initial proposalfor this book arose at that meeting out of a desire to collect together a range ofdifferent contributions from academics and practitioners working in various sectorsacross the field; there were no other published compendiums at that point which attemptedto span the latest set of methods or topics of hydrological interest that werepresented at our meeting. The starting point for the selection of authors was thesession itself. Further contributors were invited to submit papers in order to bolsterparticular sections and provide a representative selection of research across the mainthematic areas: neural networks fuzzy logic global and evolutionary optimisation emerging technologies and model integration.This book is aimed at hydrologists scientists students and practitioners interestedin a set of techniques derived largely from artificial and computational intelligenceto solve a range of problems in hydrology. We hope that this book will promotethe field of Hydroinformatics and bridge the gap between theory and practice.We would like to thank the chapter authors for their interesting contributionsand the many reviewers who have helped to make this a useful and high qualitypublication. We would also like to thank the publication team at Springer for theirefficient services.