Library

Type: Blogs
Categories: Blog
A founding member of the IoW team, Kyle Onda knows a thing or two about the lengths it takes to translate the IoW principles into practice. His diverse background offers a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities of transforming water data management. Now, in his new role as Director of the IoW at the Center for Geospatial Solutions, he is poised to advance the vision of modernized water data infrastructure even further.

Type: Blogs
Categories: Blog, Technical
Across the Western US, regional water use analysis and planning are increasingly important due to unprecedented drought and high demand growth. However, reconciling differing data access protocols, structures, and terminologies across states makes accessing water data cumbersome. Now, for the first time, WestDAAT provides user-friendly access to data in a machine-readable format for over 1.7 million active water rights.

Type: Blogs
Categories: Blog
The Hypoxia Task Force, made up of the 12 mainstem Mississippi River states, works to improve water quality in the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin. The Great Lakes to Gulf Virtual Observatory (GLTG) integrates water quality data with land use and conservation practices information, helping to track progress on nutrient loss reduction and guide decision-making in the basin.

Type: Presentations
Categories:
IoW Webinar Slides: Streamflow data are critical for decision-makers from local to regional scales who are responsible for an array of topics ranging from real-time water management to long-term water resources planning. Through this project we engaged a stakeholder advisory group to identify and compile critical streamflow monitoring metadata from 32 different organizations across the Pacific Northwest and created an interactive data visualization. We also distributed a survey to capture information about the organizations monitoring networks and quality assurance protocols and convened roundtable discussions in each state to gain additional insight into the challenges that organizations are facing and to identify priorities in regard to improved quality and accessibility of streamflow data.

Type: Blogs
Categories: Blog
When last we met, back in September 2021, the Texas Water Data Hub was truly in its infancy. Fast forward over a year and a half, and the beta version of the Texas Water Data Hub is out of the barn! Was it a smooth process to get to where we are? Well, no, not exactly. We’ve had a few obstacles pop up along our path, but we get back on the trail each time.

Type: Blogs
Categories: Blog
The USGS is the world's largest provider of in situ water data and supports the backbone systems for authoritative US water data. And yet, much of the country’s core water resources data are not managed by USGS. The Center for Geospatial Solutions is helping the USGS to address this gap by developing a widely accessible, comprehensive water data commons.

Type: Presentations
Categories: Technical
The Western States Water Council (WSWC) has completed the development of the first stage of the Western States Water Data Access and Analysis Tool (WestDAAT). WestDAAT will improve data visualization and streamline water data sharing for eighteen states in the western US. The new tool is the latest phase of the WSWC’s Water Data Exchange (WaDE) program, launched in 2011. WestDAAT encourages data sharing through a common system that improves access to and analysis of public water rights and water use data by providing this data in standardized, machine-readable formats. For the first time, WestDAAT provides access to information about surface water and groundwater prior-appropriation rights, serving approximately 2.5 million users.

Type: Blogs
Categories: Blog
A culture of modern data management has begun to take hold in the water management community. Leaders in state agencies across the country are beginning to recognize that better water data infrastructure helps them to be more effective and efficient in managing their water resources. The path to reach this goal, however, is still often unclear.

Type: Presentations
Categories:
States struggle to complete Clean Water Act Assessments due to the complexity of gathering and analyzing massive datasets. Arizona used free open-source software to reduce the time it takes to generate an assessment from 9 months to 15 minutes. In these webinar slides, Jason Jones, Senior Scientist at the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, demonstrates how Arizona's publicly accessible interactive Water Quality Assessment Dashboard provides full transparency behind each decision and informs users of what additional data is needed to fill data gaps.

Type: Presentations
Categories:
DataStream Initiative is a Canadian charity dedicated to advancing freshwater protection through open data flows. Their core programming includes a free, online platform for sharing water quality data, which was first launched in 2016. It provides a place for monitoring programs of all kinds to publish their results publicly – in secure, open, and accessible formats that support data (re)use. In this webinar, we will explore how DataStream is contributing to a growing open data system of systems and helping to advance collaborative water stewardship. We’ll take a tour through the platform and some of the twists and turns in our evolution and growth. Importantly, we’ll share the lessons learned along the way and key insights from our work in the open data space. We will finish off by discussing what is next for DataStream in the years ahead.