Water Planning Portal Tool News Participatory GIS Implementation of a pilot GIS for a volunteer water quality program
Implementation of a pilot GIS for a volunteer water quality program
This presentation to an international conference on geoinformatics describes a pilot GIS program designed to provide analyses of water quality monitoring information for a catchment group - the West/Rhode Riverkeeper Organization, Inc. (WRR), an affiliate of the international Waterkeeper Alliance. Rather than focusing on a comprehensive implementation of spatial technologies, it was the intention that the project serves as a pilot study which must be sustainable and have its technology transferred to other Riverkeeper or similar catchment organisations.
This project has been developed in a manner to ensure sustainability for the organisation and ease of use for nonexperienced GIS users. Thus, the focus is directly to ensure that these GIS techniques be developed in such a manner to allow other water quality monitoring groups to seamlessly adopt them.
The primary data incorporated into the project is obtained from part-time volunteers who reside in the study region and record weekly observations of water quality at discrete locations throughout the study domain. These data records are converted into spatial data format and ingested into COTS GIS software. In turn, a set of software operations has been formulated into simple automated tasks which W/R users may use to create their own analyses of water quality trends for dissemination to the public.
At a paper delivered at the 17th International Conference on Geoinformatics, the program developers describe the planning and resultant implementation of the pilot GIS project developed for the West/Rhode Riverkeeper. This is an end-to-end development such that the system provides all aspects necessary for meeting the goals of a fully sustainable GIS given the lack of a pre-existing geospatial program. They describe the considerations made with respect to software and hardware that will meet the long term needs of both the W/RR organisation and other Riverkeeper organisations.
Development of data inventories, including creation and maintenance of a geospatial database archive is also described. Creation of tools for non-technical staff to implement spatial manipulations is investigated, and a description of documentation and training activities concluded the presentation. Full documentation for all project aspects is provided and incorporated into a training program designed to ensure that all users understand and can easily use the spatial tools created within.
The paper provides a summary of tactics that may be used for other small, volunteer-based organisations to develop their own geospatial program without being subject to many trials and tribulations that were observed in this study.
Citation
Love, T., Trumbauer, C., Cole, C.A. 2009. "Implementation of a pilot GIS for a volunteer-based water quality monitoring program," 17th International Conference on Geoinformatics, 12-14 Aug. 2009.
