By Barb Horn, Colorado Water Quality Monitoring Council co-chair
The Colorado Water Quality Monitoring Council (CWQMC) has been trying to share water quality data, or collaborate on-the-ground monitoring, for 20 years.
That effort has finally evolved into the design and implementation of the Colorado Data Sharing Network (CDSN). The network is funded into spring 2008 by nonpoint source funds as the mechanism for legacy and future nonpoint source projects to import their data into the U.S. EPA’s Storage Retrieval System (STORET).
Using STORET will help the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment stay in compliance with nonpoint source funding requirements.
However, the project is much more than that.
The council had a broader vision of what’s needed and took advantage of this funding opportunity to design and implement a statewide water quality database. The network will improve data sharing and on-the-ground monitoring, which leads to more effective and efficient watershed planning, and restoration and protection of the state’s water quality.
The first CDSN project component is the statewide water quality database. Water quality data includes physical, chemical and biological data from rivers, lakes, reservoirs and groundwater. The system employs user documentation, storage and retrieval tools developed by EPA Region 8 and will function as a statewide STORET database. This database will include all National Modern Colorado STORET data, new STORET data and many other sources of data that currently are unavailable. The output functions include summary statistics and simple graphics.
The process to populate the database includes a list of minimum data elements, a set of standardized import templates and various levels of security. Data can move onto national STORET system or not, based on the user’s desire. The target audiences for this database are:
- Data generators who need a simple data management system because their data is not effectively managed
- Data generators who want to share data but don’t have a mechanism to do so
- Entities that need to provide their data to national STORET
- Users of water quality information
The second CDSN project component is the Web-based map directory. The ArchIMS map and tools we now use were developed in EPA Region 10 and modified for Colorado. This map will serve as an online directory of who is gathering data, where, when, how, why, and it will also provide contact information. If the data is not in the database, information will be provided about where it can be found
The final CDSN project component is local watershed, place-based metadata swaps. The target audiences for these swaps are entities involved in watershed management, data generators, users and managers in a basin The metadata, priorities and concerns are shared locally via these swap gatherings and statewide via the CWQMC. The council organizes and hosts a local watershed exchange of information among data generators. Data users express their needs from the specific (a station or parameter) to the general, for example sediment loading. Participants also share their monitoring priorities and concerns. Information from these events is captured in a summary fact sheet and provided to participants, placed on the CWQMC Web site and delivered to state water managers. This project component provides a vertical and horizontal communication venue for water quality monitoring priorities and concerns.
This fall, the Data Sharing Network project kicked off its first series of four local watershed swaps and trainings in the upper Colorado Basin. There were a total of about 40 participants in the towns of Craig, Frisco, Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction. The results will be posted in December on the CWQMC Web site. During the next two years, about 20 more local watershed swaps and trainings will be held in the:
- South Platte and Front Range Tributary Basins – March/April 2007 (Anyone interested in volunteering to be on the team, provide meeting rooms, snacks, lunch, coffee or copies should contact Barb Horn at barb.horn@state.co.us.)
- San Juan, Dolores and Gunnison Basins – November 2007
- Arkansas and Rio Grande Basins – March and April 2008
Swaps and trainings are scheduled to align with the Colorado Water Quality Control Commission’s rotating basin rulemaking hearing process. The trainings provide support for entities to upload their metadata to the Web map or actual data to the database. That way, the database will be quickly populated. Hands-on support will be provided to help enter legacy data into the system. Anyone can attend these events for hands-on training or access an online guide to teach themselves; and anyone can enter data at anytime, not just via these sessions.
CDSN has produced an outreach strategy document that provides the outline and direction for conducting swaps and trainings. Long-term sustainability is also a significant task and deliverable for this project. A strategy is being developed to ensure long-term technical, financial and political support to continue the watershed swaps, and operation and maintenance of the Web map and database. The future of CDSN will be supported and funded by data generators, users and watershed managers statewide. All documents and basin swap fact sheets are available at www.coloradowatershed.org/CWQMC.
The membership of the CDSN and CWQMC is diverse. It includes participants from the federal, state and local, public and private, profit and nonprofit sectors. This diversity is why the project came to fruition and why it will succeed in the long term. Everyone involved needs comprehensive and high-quality watershed data to do their job. None of us could develop and maintain the CDSN alone, yet many of us reinvent this effort on a smaller scale. The CDSN provides the opportunity to save money by allowing entities that were spending funds on developing group databases to allocate those dollars for other tasks.
To learn more about this exciting project, get in our contact database or learn when we’ll be in your watershed, visit www.coloradowatershed.org/CWQMC or contact Barb Horn at barb.horn@state.co.us.
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