The Water Quality Portal: a single point of access for water quality data

Abstract:

The Water Quality Portal (WQP) is a cooperative project between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) overseen by the National Water Quality Monitoring Council (NWQMC). It was launched in April of 2012 as a single point of access for discrete water quality samples stored in the USGS NWIS and EPA STORET systems. Since launch thousands of users have visited the Water Quality Portal to download billions of results that are pertinent to their interests. Numerous tools have also been developed that use WQP web services as a source of data for further analysis. Since the launch of the Portal, the WQP development team at the USGS Center for Integrated Data Analytics has worked with USGS and EPA stakeholders as well as the wider user community to add significant new features to the WQP. WQP users can now directly plot sites of interest on a web map based on any of the 164 WQP query parameters, and then download data of interest directly from that map. In addition, the WQP has expanded beyond just serving out NWIS and STORET data, and provides data from the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service STEWARDS system, the USGS BioData system and is working with others to bring in additional data. Finally, the WQP is linked to another NWQMC-supported project, the National Environmental Methods Index (NEMI), so WQP users can easily find the method behind the data that they are using. Future work is focused on incorporating additional biological data from the USGS BioData system, broadening the scope of discrete water quality sample types from STORET, and developing approaches to make the data in the WQP more visible and usable. The WQP team is also exploring ways to further integrate with other systems, such as those operated the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and other federal agencies to facilitate the overarching goal of improving access to water quality data for all users.