Access the Latest Monitoring Data in the Valley
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Working in close partnership with Friends of the Shenandoah River (FOSR) and The Downstream Project, our team has completed a massive effort to open sixteen years and nearly 300,000 readings of water quality monitoring data through FOSR’s newly designed, Water Window application. Founded in 1989 by a group of like-minded citizens and scientists, FOSR is a volunteer, non-profit, scientific organization dedicated to the preservation and protection of the Shenandoah River and its tributaries. Leveraging the power of the community, FOSR mobilizes it’s volunteer base to conduct sampling across 382 sites from Port Republic, VA, to Harper’s Ferry, WV twice per month. One of the major challenges our project team worked to address, consisted of providing FOSR staff with the applications necessary to manage, visualize, and share the results of their monitoring efforts with their volunteers and state agencies.
We started by gaining a firm understanding of the organization’s current data management procedures from collection of data at the source, to analysis, then QA checks, and finally dissemination to the public. Chesapeake Commons implemented a tailored data management solution that allows the FOSR staff to easily maintain all aspects of the Water Window’s sites, readings, and parameters with a few clicks. Bringing a new monitoring site online takes seconds and the user is able to add location and a variety of other attributes such as drainage areas to the new site profile. Readings can be added in batches and the system will automatically ensure that all values are appropriately related to the correct monitoring sites.
The public facing application provides light mapping and charting capabilities, with the intent to enable state agencies and other organizations to download subsets of FOSR’s water quality monitoring enterprise. Users can browse to a sampling site from the map or use the search bar to explore a variety of related geographies in reference to where FOSR volunteers sample. Readings can be downloaded from a site or watershed scale and we also support the ability to build your own queries from the Data page. Our team has integrated metrics into the platform to gain a better understanding of usability. We will leverage this information to inform future versions of the Water Window and functionality that use FOSR data to power a variety of useful information products to those working to improve the subwatersheds of the Shenandoah.
Our return on investment due to the team’s hard work will continue to grow as small watershed organizations across Bay jurisdictions begin to rapidly and cost effectively adopt similar approaches to managing and sharing data associated with their volunteer monitoring programs. Moving forward, Chesapeake Commons will to expand the application’s utility for other organizations to ultimately unify monitoring standards across the Bay’s volunteer programs and leverage these data to inform progress toward local total maximum daily load goals. If you’d like to learn how you can get started managing your organization’s data in a similar way to Friends of the Shenandoah River, get in touch!
Originally published at chesapeakecommons.org on August 10, 2016.
