Nooksack Watershed Management Project

The Decision Support System

How do limited amounts of water get divided among many different users, including dwindling fish stocks? What are the most effective and realistic ways to protect water quality in Whatcom County? The WRIA 1 Watershed Management Project is trying to answer these and other water-related questions with the help of a Decision Support System (DSS)-a series of computer models that will use scientific data to help predict what might happen under different water policies.

The DSS plays an important role in the project's ultimate goal-a management plan for the water resources of WRIA 1-because it will help project participants to figure out the trade-offs among different management policies and programs. It is a tool to organize the tremendous amount of scientific data about water resources and to help show the connections among water supplies, water quality, instream flow, and fish habitat.

The DSS will have several components. At its heart will be a database containing information about the quality and quantity of water in WRIA 1, fish habitat, current and projected land uses, and other information. The DSS's other components will help users to access, analyze, and display the information in the database in different ways. For example, there will be a "data visualization" element to show data as maps, charts, and tables; models to help project water use, water quality, and other issues into the future; and an "alternatives builder" that will allow users to test different water policies and project their relative effects.

While the DSS will be a powerful tool, it does have some limitations. It is meant to indicate trends and probabilities, and the relative benefits and disadvantages of policy choices. For example, the DSS might predict that one management option might maintain the temperature of a stream at 16 degrees Celsius, and that a second option would lower it to 14ºC. While the actual results might not be those exact numbers, the DSS would be indicating that the second option is associated with a lower stream temperature.

Another limitation of the DSS has to do with certainty. Because more data have been collected in some parts of WRIA 1 than in others, the DSS will have more certainty in some areas than in others-for example, users can have more confidence about predictions for a certain creek where information has been consistently collected for several decades, than for a creek where only a few samples have been taken. The DSS will not tell planners how to achieve a certain goal, such as a particular temperature in a particular stream. Rather, it will indicate what the general effect of a change might be on water temperature.

In addition to helping citizens and governments to develop the Watershed Management Plan, the DSS will provide a long-term way of managing information collected about water in WRIA 1. The DSS will be designed so that both new data and new types of data, such as economic information, can be added and analyzed in the future.

A preliminary "alpha" version of the DSS is expected to be ready at the end of June 2002. This summer, the WRIA 1 Watershed Management Project will begin running scenarios on the DSS. A "beta" version of the DSS will be available by the end of the year, with the first full version ready in spring 2003.

Click here to ask a question about the project.

Are you having technical problems with this web site? Contact the Webmaster.

This site hosted by:

Also, visit these community water resource sites also hosted by WSU Cooperative Extension Whatcom County.