CSU And EPA Partner To Expand Water Data Access
The Radical Open Science Syndicate (ROSS) — a watershed data science lab in the Warner College of Natural Resources — partnered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to improve water data access through Tools for Automated Data Analysis, or TADA, a toolkit empowering water resource managers to use the data they collect.
U.S. water monitoring programs contribute hundreds of millions of data points to the Water Quality Portal, the nation’s largest water data repository. These data help water entities make critical source water protection decisions. They also provide Clean Water Act regulatory guidance and help researchers understand water quality changes. Despite the potential of these water quality observations, the data are often difficult to access and analyze. These barriers make it challenging to distill actionable insights.
Duke University and the Internet of Water Coalition funded ROSS to make water quality data more accessible. However, they found that the EPA’s Office of Water already had built TADA. Rather than recreate tools, ROSS directly partnered with the EPA. They applied their open-source and geospatial science expertise to improve TADA, adding functions like simplified spatial data queries to streamline data access in specific locations.
“This is a great example of a successful partnership,” said Matthew Ross, ROSS principal investigator. “The EPA had incredibly clear needs and open-source documentation of them, allowing us to jump in and build vital tools that couldn’t have been built without our collaboration.”
Source: Colorado State University