One of the main BWS activities is gathering data. We’ve been gathering data for over seven years. We’ve got tons of it, piled up in boxes, tucked away on closet shelves, sealed in jars in the back of the fridge. I accidentally kicked a bucket of data over in the shop the other day and spent half an hour sweeping up all the ones and zeros.
But seriously, it is getting out of hand. This is not to say our data is sitting idle. Our water quality data is publicly available on the Pacific DataStream website. Some of our stage data (‘stage’ is the hydrological term for the height of water in a creek) is being used by Kate McMillan, the honours student from the University of Victoria who you may have met in September. She was in Fanny Bay measuring well levels as part of her study of Aquifer 419, the Fanny Bay aquifer. We are also working on a project to make our groundwater data viewable in the form of online maps.
However, data is more powerful when it is interconnected. Imagine a researcher studying the Waterloo Creek watershed. They might look at our water quality data and want to know how much water was flowing when a particular set of samples were taken. Or how much rain had fallen in the days prior to the sampling. BWS can answer those questions, but it would take a lot of work. Rainfall data is publicly available, but someone has to download it and match up the dates. We have the stage data for Waterloo Creek for that period, but someone has to locate the file and, again, match up the dates. Once the stage data is located then it must be converted to flow rates using transect data. Another file to find! After that, we can finally answer the researcher’s question.
Our ultimate goal is to be able to find these kinds of answers amongst all that related data with just a click of the mouse. This would give us the power to see patterns and trends that aren’t visible otherwise. Creating such an interconnected database is a huge project but the alternative is to continue to amass data that is awkward to access. BWS has budgeted funds and resources for just such a project. Our plan is to take our data management to the next level.
I, for one, will be glad to have those boxes of data out of our closets, out of our fridge and that bucket of ones and zeroes out of my shop.