Sacramento River Watershed Model (SWIM) Phase II
Project Contractors
- LocusCorp GIS Consulting
- Western Shasta RCD
- Iris Software (SRWP webmaster)
- Additional GIS consultants to be determined through a RFP process
SRWP Project Lead
Kathy Russick, SRWP Program Coordinator
krussick@comcast.net
Project Budget
$400,000
Funding Source
Prop 50 CALFED Watershed Program Grant through the California Department of Water Resources
Project Schedule
November 1, 2006 – December 31, 2008
Project Background
The Sacramento River Watershed Program (SRWP) helps disseminate information about the Sacramento River and its watershed and has worked for years to develop a watershed center so its stakeholders and the public can have access to watershed information. With the increasing prominence of the Internet, the SRWP realized that its website could be a virtual watershed center and would be the most effective way to communicate and provide watershed information to its stakeholders and the public.
In 2001 CALFED funded Western Shasta Resource Conservation District (RCD) to develop an Internet Watershed Information Model (WIM) that covers all of Shasta, portions of Tehama, Modoc, Lassen and Siskiyou counties. The WIM project has been very successful in advancing the use of scientific information, enhancing watershed networks and implementing sustainable strategies for watershed management. For these reasons, the SRWP has initiated a project to expand WIM to cover the remaining counties and sub-watersheds within the Sacramento River Watershed. It is called the Sacramento Watershed Information Module (SWIM) and will become a key feature of SRWP’s website. SWIM will be an on-line database of maps, GIS coverages, watershed documents, photos, and other resources that will be searchable through an on-line map interface. SWIM will be accessible to web users through their own web browsers and; thus, will not require special software.
The SRWP is currently conducting Phase I of the SWIM project, which is funded by the SRWP EPA grant and will end in December 2006. In Phase I, the SRWP is building the structure of the SWIM on-line database and is installing publicly accessible GIS coverages. However, the funding does not allow the SRWP to populate SWIM with the variety of resources that it is intended to hold.
Project Description
The SRWP has been awarded $400,000 from the CALFED Watershed Program to fund Phase II of the SWIM Project. Phase II will expand the features of SWIM and will gather resources and data to populate SWIM. Once completed, SWIM will become an important resource for many of the watershed organizations within the Sacramento River Watershed. Through Web links, watershed organizations and local water agencies will be able to have customized map interfaces on their own websites that will be based upon a map (and associated GIS coverages) of their watershed(s). Phase II of project SWIM is a collaborative effort by the SRWP, Western Shasta RCD, Locus Cor GIS, Iris Software, and is composed of the following tasks.
Task 1. Develop New Features and Improvements for SWIM
As SWIM is developed in Phase I, there will be functionality issues, features, and gaps in content that will be identified but will not be addressed due to budget limitations. In this task, those issues and features will be prioritized, work plans to address them will be developed, and project team staff will be assigned to address them.
From a user perspective, in this task SWIM will be improved to enable web users to design and print high quality custom maps by accessing SWIM with their web browsers. This will be a great benefit to many watershed organizations who have limited or no internal capability to produce watershed maps.
Task 2. Develop Custom Views for Subwatersheds
Develop custom interactive map views of subwatersheds within the Sacramento River watershed so watershed organizations can essentially have their own watershed information module for their websites.
In Phase I, custom views of a few large subwatersheds will be developed (e.g., for the tributary rivers and large creeks that flow into the Sacramento River). In Phase II, custom views will be developed for dozens of creek subwatersheds within the Sacramento River watershed. An interactive custom view for a subwatershed will bring up a map of the subwatershed along with a standard menu of map features that the user can turn on or off. The custom view will incorporate not just a base map of the subwatershed but a standard set of GIS map layers for that subwatershed. The intent is to link the websites of watershed organizations to these custom views; thus providing all the features of SWIM to local watershed organizations for a custom website view of just their subwatershed.
Task 3. Provide Funding to Regional and/or Local Organizations to Gather Documents for SWIM
In this task funding is allocated to gather, process and upload into SWIM documents and other resources on local watersheds (reports, GIS coverages, maps, photos, data, etc.). Some of the resources will be electronically available and easy to upload, others will need to be tracked down in different agencies and either reformatted or scanned to make them electronically available. In this task, regional and/or local organizations will be funded to track down, gather, and upload these resources to ensure that SWIM gets populated in a timely fashion so it becomes a useful on-line resource to all watershed stakeholders.
As the GIS coverages are developed and as resources such as project site information are keyed into the map layers, gaps in information will be discovered. Under this task, funding may also be made available to fund field work to verify geographic locations.
Task 4. Expand Information on Focus Topics
SWIM will become a virtual library of watershed resources containing a broad array of information that has been developed and collected by watershed organizations throughout the Sacramento River Watershed. However, SWIM will organize some of this information into topics areas in response to stakeholder interest and in relation to the SRWP’s areas of interest.
Definite focus topics for SWIM will be water quality monitoring and data (including connecting to statewide water quality databases such as CEDEN, BDAT, and SWAMP), watershed management and organizations, mercury, toxic pollutants, and invasive plants. Potential focus topics that will be considered and selected in Phase I of SWIM include: flood risk, land use and land use changes, river recreation, and riparian and terrestrial wildlife habitats. Through the stakeholder input process, additional focus topics will be identified and considered.
