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Watershed Portals and Libraries
The Upper Merced River Watershed Council chose Wolf and Associates to advance this project in part because of the other open source, watershed portals it had developed and because of their vision of scientists, restorationists, grant makers, volunteers and other stakeholders using the web to collaborate on projects and make better use of the resources.
In order to collaborate, stakeholders need to have equal access to bibliographic references, databases, GIS layers, maps, photos, lists of projects, people, researchers, organizations, and more. A great deal of time and money is wasted not being able to find this public domain information and duplicating each other’s effort. Worse, lack of access to these resources leads to less productive research and restoration projects
A watershed web library should eventually make it easy to search and access every resource that might be helpful to the goals and strategies of the organizations and individuals with a stake in the watershed. Stakeholders will more readily participate in improving the library’s usefulness when there is enough information already there for the library to be of use to them.
To advance this goal, Wolf and Associates organized a programming sprint at UC Davis to make it easy for stakeholders with Procite and Endnote collections to upload them into watershed and subject-based web libraries. Once a watershed library has a large corpus of important bibliographic references including some extensive collections on important species, pollutants, invasive weeds, and restoration efforts in the Upper Merced watershed, it will be ready to build out the collaboration tools.
Portal collaboration tools will make easy for researchers and stakeholders to identify and prioritize:
The next steps in this project will depend on funding directly for it or on other watersheds and projects that take the core programming code and build on it. Wolf and Associates hopes that by making all the code available in the public domain, it will encourage others to take this work and build on it. Collectively, we can create a more powerful, more useful and cheaper watershed portals to benefit all.
In order to collaborate, stakeholders need to have equal access to bibliographic references, databases, GIS layers, maps, photos, lists of projects, people, researchers, organizations, and more. A great deal of time and money is wasted not being able to find this public domain information and duplicating each other’s effort. Worse, lack of access to these resources leads to less productive research and restoration projects
A watershed web library should eventually make it easy to search and access every resource that might be helpful to the goals and strategies of the organizations and individuals with a stake in the watershed. Stakeholders will more readily participate in improving the library’s usefulness when there is enough information already there for the library to be of use to them.
To advance this goal, Wolf and Associates organized a programming sprint at UC Davis to make it easy for stakeholders with Procite and Endnote collections to upload them into watershed and subject-based web libraries. Once a watershed library has a large corpus of important bibliographic references including some extensive collections on important species, pollutants, invasive weeds, and restoration efforts in the Upper Merced watershed, it will be ready to build out the collaboration tools.
Portal collaboration tools will make easy for researchers and stakeholders to identify and prioritize:
- key data gaps and hypotheses for future studies
- the most important areas to begin invasive weed removal or pollutant reductions
- the best forestry and ranching practices, and more
The next steps in this project will depend on funding directly for it or on other watersheds and projects that take the core programming code and build on it. Wolf and Associates hopes that by making all the code available in the public domain, it will encourage others to take this work and build on it. Collectively, we can create a more powerful, more useful and cheaper watershed portals to benefit all.