A dozen classic readings in Water Resources Management                 Jay R. Lund, UC Davis

1)      Frontinus, Sextus Julius (97 AD), The Water Supply of the City of Rome.  Available on several web sites (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/waters/front.html).  A translation by Clemens Herschel was published by the New England Water Works Association (1973).  Many water management problems never change.  An organized quantitative approach has long been fundamental to effective water management.

2)      Maass, Arthur, Maynard M. Hufschmidt, Robert Dorfman, Harold A. Thomas Jr., Stephan A. Marglin, and Gordon Maskew Fair (1962), Design of Water-Resource Systems, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.  Classic early work on modern interdisciplinary systems analysis and design for water resource systems.  The major work from the Harvard Water Program.

3)      Morgan, Arthur E. (1950), The Miami Conservancy District, McGraw-Hill Book Co., N.Y.  A great and excellent example of the effective co-development of hydrology, hydraulics, engineering design and planning, and governing laws and institutions for water management, particularly flood control.  Most of today’s flood engineering techniques and institutions are descended from those developed by Morgan and others in the 1910-1920s. (for a 1918 version try http://cee.engr.ucdavis.edu/faculty/lund/Classes/MiamiConservancy.pdf, 8MB)

4)      Loucks, D.P., J.R. Stedinger, and D.A. Haith (1981), Water Resource Systems Planning and Analysis, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.  Still the most coherent single work applying operations research methods to water resource planning problems.

5)      Hazen, Allen M. (1914), "Storage to be Provided in Impounding Reservoirs for Municipal Water Supply," Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. 77, December, pp. 1542-1669 (including discussions).  A great classic in the probabilistic analysis of water resources systems.

6)      White, Gilbert, David J. Bradley, and Anne U. White (1972), Drawers of Water, University of Chicago Press.  A defining work in water and sanitation problems and behavior at the household scale.  Particularly written for developing countries.

7)      Tarr, Joel A. (1984), "Water and Wastes: A Retrospective Assessment of Wastewater Technology in the U.S., 1800-1932," Technology and Culture, Vol. 25, No. 2 (April), pp. 226-263.  Superb discussion of how wastewater technology and management institutions developed in the United States.

8)      Maass and Young (1978), … And the Desert Shall Rejoice, MIT Press.  A marvelous look at how the operations of irrigation districts in Spain and the US are managed in economic and political terms. 

9)      Blomquist, William (1992), Dividing the Waters: Governing Groundwater in Southern California, ICS Press, San Francisco, CA, 415 pp.  An outstanding work on groundwater management in southern California, how law, politics, and groundwater problems evolve together with time.

10)   Kelley, Robert (1989), Battling the Inland Sea, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.  A history of flood control on the Sacramento River.  Illustrates the long and difficult path from discovering a major problem to understanding and managing it at a large regional scale. 

11)   Walker, Richard A. and Matthew J. Williams (1982), "Water from Power: Water Supply and Regional Growth in the Santa Clara Valley," Economic Geography, Vol. 58, No. 2 (April), pp. 95-119.  Presents the development of economy, population, institutions and water management in the Santa Clara Valley.  An excellent discussion of water management at the local level, where most water management occurs.

12)   Blake, Nelson (1956), Water for the Cities: A History of the Urban Water Supply Problem in the United States, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 341 pp.  Great discussion of early development of urban water supply system technology and management institutions for the US.