Introducing Water Sage California

Water research platform provides clarity on murky water rights debate

Ponderosa Advisors, LLC announced reccently it has released Water Sage California, the largest integrated water and land information platform for the state.

Water Sage is a web-based mapping and research platform designed to help everyone – from water planning officials to landowners, lawyers, banks, realtors, and conservation groups – gain greater access to information surrounding water and land.

Water Sage is the only system of its kind that incorporates all of California’s water and land data into a single platform and enables users to research, visualize, and analyze cumbersome datasets together in one screen. Users can tap into all of the state’s surface water rights, groundwater wells, measurement gages, land use, and ownership at one time and receive meaningful intelligence and comprehensive results in seconds. Water Sage also includes referential map layers and web links to original records and legal documents. Data can be exported into GoogleEarth, GIS-compatible formats, or Excel files to further enable project management.

“California is the epicenter for the water debate in the U.S., and as the state implements an ambitious and important plan to manage its water resources, it is critical that stakeholders are utilizing objective, data-driven intelligence when making water-related decisions,” said Kelly Bennett, co-founder of Ponderosa Advisors.

“We developed our California platform in consultation with a diverse set of water users and stakeholders from across the state and are pleased to enter the conversation with Water Sage California,” added Bennett.

Because each state has a unique legal and administrative framework, Ponderosa Advisors builds Water Sage as state-specific systems that represent each state’s regulatory schema and reflects its managerial priorities. Water Sage California has been designed with an eye toward the goals of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, including easy-to-use tools to assess compliance and data requirements associated with the new law.

“Water Sage is built to be optimized for real-life business or government agency applications in diverse sectors,” explained Bennett, “We work painstakingly to ensure that while users are able to access many millions of records across our datasets, they can do so in a way that is practical to their workflows.” That means flexible text-based and spatial search functionalities, powerful filters, and intuitive visualizations to do on-the-fly analyses.

Ponderosa Advisors conceived of Water Sage as part of its mission to increase transparency, data access, and working efficiency in the water sector. The team combines seasoned water resource specialists with expert software developers to create a functional working group with unique natural resource-specific technical mastery. California is the fifth state Ponderosa Advisors has mapped with its cutting-edge water and land information platform, Water Sage.

About Water Sage
Water Sage is a web-based mapping and research platform that integrates water rights, well, and land data, with diverse analytical capabilities. Water Sage provides simple, efficient access to this data, helping users understand and evaluate water rights and their relationship to land. The platform is the brainchild of the team at Denver-based Ponderosa Advisors, LLC, a firm of analysts, lawyers, technical experts and developers, that believe access to information and transparency facilitates better decision-making, which benefits everyone.