Developing a National Data Portal for Serving Biological and Hydrological Information

The primary objective of the US Geological Survey's National Water Census (NWC) is to place technical information and tools in the hands of stakeholders, allowing them to answer two primary questions about water availability: (1) does the Nation have enough freshwater to meet both human and ecological needs, and (2) will sufficient water be available to meet future needs? To meet these goals the NWC is collaborating with the National Water Quality Assessment Program (NAWQA) and the Center for Integrated Data Analytics (CIDA) to develop a cyber data portal. The three teams will work together to expand the capability of the BioData/BioShare aquatic ecological data-entry/storage/retrieval system beyond its current support for the NAWQA program. Import templates will be developed to allow researchers and others to prepare their aquatic ecological data (e.g., fish and macroinvertebrate) for batch loading into the common database. The BioShare retrieval system will be adapted to serve the pooled data. The portal, developed by CIDA, will be based on common technology standards for exchanging and integrating environmental observations. This will enable connections to other large data collections including the Water Quality Portal which combines water-quality data collected by federal, state and tribal organizations. Estimates of daily streamflow as well as a suite of ecologically relevant hydrologic metrics will be integrated with biological observations in the portal through a common spatial framework, NHD+. Access to data and analyses from the NWC portal will be through map-based displays as well as data services. Components of the portal will be accessible directly by GIS and statistical tools through web services. Ultimately, this web portal will simultaneously serve biological and hydrologic information to facilitate studies of ecological flow by allowing stakeholders to link these components at regional, state, or basin scales.