Water Features

IoW Data Hubs allow users to publish water data from disparate sources in one place, ensuring that data and metadata from these disparate sources are standardized before they are published so that they can be seamlessly found and used together. IoW Hubs are a key element of the underlying architecture that makes an internet of water possible.

All across the US, hydropower plants are nearing the end of their current licenses, allowing communities to reevaluate them through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) relicensing process. There are a little over one thousand FERC licensed dams across the US, and more than 400 of them are scheduled to come up for relicensing by 2033.

It's important to be able to share data in ways that are easy for scientists and water professionals to analyze and for developers to use to make tools and communication materials. In this blog, Kyle Onda describes practices that the Internet of Water Initiative at the Lincoln Institute's Center for Geospatial Solutions recommends for sharing geospatial vector data.

The Colorado River Basin is in a historic drought. Many basin states are facing increasing variability in precipitation and water needs and infrastructure are more complex than ever. Given these challenges, water budgeting is also more complex. To promote transparency and collaboration, the Nicholas Institute Water Policy Program developed the Water Budget Navigator.

Water data are collected by a variety of public agencies, each with its own data standards, formats, and sharing protocols. This fragmentation makes it difficult for data users to access the data they need. In 2021, The Nicholas Institute Water Policy Program completed a Technology Adoption Research Project to learn more about data management at public agencies.

Through our start-up period, we learned that the strength of the IoW is its capacity to unite independent organizations around the common goal of modernizing water data infrastructure. Now, as we enter our growth phase, we are scaling up from a project of the Nicholas Institute to a coalition of organizations working with government partners to enact the IoW vision.