This paper presents the potential use of Qualitative Reasoning (QR) to capture and communicate knowledge on sustainable catchment management. Based on a case study, qualitative models dealing with issues of a sustainable development of riverine landscapes were developed and implemented using the Garp3 software following a general modeling framework. The evaluation of the models and the QR approach by students and experts revealed the high potential of QR models to capture and communicate complex knowledge in an understandable and interesting manner, mainly due to the ability of the presented approach to capture qualitative system dynamics and integrate ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ facts in a structured way. In the future a library of expert models might serve as an important source of information for both, education and management.