As the year comes to an end and winter settles in, you may be reflecting on the past and looking toward the future.
It is no different for water managers, who rely on historic, current and forecasted data to plan for the future.
Luckily, here in the Yampa River Basin, we now have a data dashboard that serves as a central hub for historic, current and forecasted data collected from multiple sources across the basin to help quickly gather the information needed to make informed decisions.
The Yampa River Dashboard, launched by the Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District in late October, was the result of a recommendation from the Yampa River Integrated Water Management Plan. The Yampa-White-Green Basin Roundtable awarded grant-funding to kick-start the project in late 2022.
UYWCD spearheaded the dashboard project, bringing together a comprehensive group of stakeholders to develop tools that pull data from a number of sources and provide information tailored to specific water-user interests.
The dashboard, found at YourYampaRiver.org, wasn't just developed with water managers in mind. The project was intended to assist water managers with decision-making and provide access to watershed data that is typically difficult to find. Available watershed data is often buried deep within an agency website, not only making it hard to find, but nearly impossible to compare with data sets from other sources or sampling locations -- even for those who work in the water industry.
Dashboard users can explore data in the following four categories: watershed health, watershed management, agriculture and land, and recreation. The landing page for each of these categories contains customized tools that include data from multiple sources, links to existing sites and additional resources.
Dashboard tools allow users to create their own year-over-year comparisons and time series summaries, look at current flows and temperatures simultaneously across the basin, compare data sets like snow depth and soil moisture, and gather water quality data for specific locations.
The Yampa River Dashboard is intended to simplify the process for anyone seeking the scientific data impacting our watershed and will serve as a free resource to anyone interested in exploring water data in the Yampa River Basin. You can check it out anytime at YourYampaRiver.org