New Maps Identify Location of River Groups and Grants
How do you take information in a table and show it graphically on a map? Ask Matt Rehwald, IS Data Services Professional for the Bureau of Watershed Management and the Water Division’s lead on Geographical Information System (GIS) web-mapping applications. In answering this question, Matt explained, “You can’t learn this in school; you really have to experience it for yourself. In my cartography class, we talked about spatialization of data, taking data from a table and then connecting it to a GIS system so it is geolocated on a map. But in my work with the DNR, I’ve had a lot of on-the-job training. It’s fun to see others view their data for the first time on a map.”
Rehwald recently unveiled his latest work - full-scale maps that identify the location of Wisconsin River Groups, DNR River Management Grants, and DNR River Planning Grants. River Groups is a broad term that includes Friends groups, non-profit organizations and other local government groups whose passion is studying, monitoring, protecting, educating the public, and restoring river habit.
View River Group and Grant Maps
The River Management and Planning Grant maps show the geographic distribution of the DNR grants, name of the River Group, grant number, and number of grants. Tom Nowakowski, Rivers Grant Manager with the Bureau of Community Financial Assistance, proposed developing the maps to improve evaluation and ranking of river planning projects and identify underserved areas. Nowakowski also suggested partnering with The River Alliance of Wisconsin to glean some of the data for the maps from information already contained in the organization’s database.
Allison Werner and Laura MacFarland, both from The River Alliance, began the project by identifying active River Groups. Then they painstakingly tried to match groups with DNR hydrologic unit codes (HUCs) for Wisconsin watersheds or sections of rivers where River Groups provide stewardship, as well as counties for groups with a county-level focus. HUCs are 8-12 digit numbers that delineate progressively smaller watersheds and range in size from regions, which can cover several states, to subwatersheds, which generally cover areas of 25 to 50 square miles. HUCs start with a two-digit code for the region level, and then additional two-digit codes are appended as one moves in to smaller watersheds. The subwatershed level contains a 12-digit HUC.
One of the difficulties of matching the Rivers Group organizational boundaries with watersheds is that some local Rivers Groups work on only specific parts of rivers or parts of multiple watersheds. Case in point: Friends of the Upper Yahara River. This group’s work concentrates on the headwaters of the Yahara River, slightly north of Deforest, to just north of its confluence with Token Creek.
Rehwald refined the information provided by The River Alliance. “Organizing the data into a mappable form was one of the most difficult aspects of the project. Most of my time was spent performing quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) of the data. At the end of the QA/QC process, I was able to join the Rivers Group data together with the spatial data by HUC code or by county name. When a Rivers Group worked in more than one HUC or multiple counties, I had to create a custom representation of the group’s working boundaries by joining several HUCs or counties together.” He followed the same process to create the River Planning and Management Grants maps.
Once the maps were finished, Nowakowski was able to “see” the distribution of River Planning and Management Grants across the state. He plans to use this information in assessing underserved areas or areas of limited organizational resources—criteria factored into the statewide river grant application ranking process. The maps will also help University of Wisconsin Extension Basin Educators target groups interested in forming Friends organizations in areas where they currently do not exist. Citizen monitoring trainings can also be better coordinated with existing Rivers Groups using the new geolocated information.
Rehwald will eventually merge this mapped information into the Surface Water Data Viewer (SWDV) – the Bureau of Watershed Management’s interactive internet web mapping tool. Over the last four years, Rehwald has been the GIS mapper for the SWIMS, SWDV, WATERS, and other Water Division databases. Much of the data Rehwald has mapped is available to the public.
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