Advancing Water Resources Research and Management

It is a pleasure to have a chance to speak with the AWRA today about water resources and the Internet, as seen from a New England perspective. In the time available, we will endeavor to offer you: an overview of the process we employed to develop this paper; some historical background on the development of water resource management in New England; a view of the scope of problems facing our region’s water resource managers today; a perspective on where we see the Internet going in the next five to ten years (in the spirit of Wayne Gretsky, we want to focus not on where the puck is, but rather where it is going); and a discussion of several potentially promising applications of the Internet and its offspring for addressing water resource challenges. We will conclude with a brief discussion of possible next steps for New England and other water resource managers.

If we leave you with one big idea, we hope it is this one: in the face of enormously complex challenges facing water resources managers, the ubiquity, speed and power of the Internet will grow dramatically in the next ten years. New networks can vastly improve the efficiency and precision of outreach efforts, administrative efforts, and the monitoring and management of natural and built systems. However, realizing this potential will require managers to keep their eyes on where the Internet "puck" is going, and to think strategically about how it may be used as a tool to pursue mission objectives.

Let me give you a brief overview of the process we employed to prepare this paper. In the Fall of 1998, as a Fellow at the Kennedy School, I became acquainted with Henry Foster who, as many of you know, has had a distinguished career in natural resources, including service as chairman the Massachusetts Water Resources Commission, Secretary of Environmental Affairs for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Having a background both as a management consultant to the information technology industry and as a board member of several conservation organizations, I brought into my discussions with Foster a collection of ideas about how new information technologies are shaping natural resource use in this nation. He and I subsequently discussed several ways to collaborate with our complementary sets of expertise, including the production of a paper for this meeting.

To expand our own points of view on Water Resources and the Internet, we convened in July 1999 a panel of eight water resources professionals and four information technology professionals, in addition to ourselves, to discuss how the Internet and its offspring might contribute to water resource management over the next five to ten years (see Appendix 1 to this presentation for a list of participants). The discussion was wide-ranging and informative, and has contributed greatly to our thinking on the subject.

The geographic focus of our work, New England, has a long and proud history of conservation leadership in the public, non-profit and private sectors. In the water resources sector, New England was among the first regions to adopt an interstate compact for water pollution control and to start the process of setting quality standards for its waters. New England is, nevertheless, a relatively conservative region where most land is privately held, most power is produced by investor-owned utilities, and many land use decisions are labored over by highly participative town governments. My own town, Belmont, Massachusetts, which is just west of Cambridge, has a town meeting of 288 members representing a population of about 25,000 people (a ratio of one representative for fewer than each 100 residents). We just concluded a three-year process deliberating over the re-zoning of a several hundred-acre parcel of land. The process included a series of votes by town meeting and, eventually, a public referendum! New Englanders are not quick to accept change, even today.

In this context, we New Englanders have had mixed results in our efforts to achieve effective water resources management. We have had some notable successes. With the massive investment made by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority in a metropolitan water system that serves much of the greater Boston area, the Charles River and Boston Harbor have experienced dramatic improvements in water quality over the last decade. Conversely, interstate (and inter-provincial) efforts to improve conditions in the Gulf of Maine have not resolved a panoply of thorny water quality issues in an area that stretches from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia (for information on ongoing work in the Gulf of Maine, see www.gulfofmaine.org/times/ ).

Despite notable successes, a host of challenges still face New England water resource administrators. The challenges include, but are not limited to, the following:

• A number of watersheds in rapidly developing residential areas are experiencing low groundwater and surface water conditions; for example, this past summer, water conditions on the Ipswich River were severe, with the river going periodically dry at several locations (see, for example, the news item at www.townonline.com/north/reading/news/newRAIpswich_0805_7.html);
• 40% of Massachusetts rivers remain below minimum water quality standard levels;
• Massachusetts has lost 30% of its wetlands due to past development and drainage;
• Invasive plants such as water chestnuts are a growing problem in ponds, lakes, and streams, as well as navigable waterways;
• In Massachusetts alone, 170,000 acres of shellfish beds are closed; similarly, beds are closed further downeast, in both New Hampshire and Maine;
• We have pervasive non-point pollution problems that are damaging fresh and saltwater habitat; for instance, fertilizer-rich run-off is killing eelgrass in Cape Cod estuaries and in the process damaging scallop habitat; and
• Investment in dams and reservoirs has failed to eliminate the concern of flooding.

Now we turn to the Internet. One of the most compelling comments I have heard on the subject recently was from the head of a regional watershed management group: "I know I should have a web site, but I don’t know why." The answer to "why" is critical. Approached with strategic intent, Internet applications can yield impressive results. Without clear objectives, they can be a waste of time and money.

The Internet, as most of you know very well, is much more than static web pages. Additional applications include e-mail, nearly CD-quality audio, streaming video, telephony, videoconferencing -- and, over the next ten years, a host of applications that probably have not yet been imagined.

While I cannot tell you exactly how people will use the Internet 10 years from now, what I can project with some certainty is that the Internet and its offspring will be faster, cheaper and better. We know that from looking at the "product roadmaps" of information technology vendors. Furthermore, we can project that these networked technologies are likely to catalyze sea changes in the way that many organizations do their work. This includes water resource management organizations that are striving to meet the challenges we discussed above. Several of the sea changes that these new networks may catalyze in the water resources sector, and which I will focus on today, are: market transformation, enhanced public outreach, data integration and organizational coordination, increasingly pervasive sensing capability, and workflow automation.

With our panel of water resources and information technology professionals, we came up with four general areas in which Internet-related applications could make a significant impact on the professional practice of water resource organizations: the Public Arena, the Administrative Arena, the Natural Systems Arena and the Built Systems Arena. I will first address potential applications in the Public Arena.

It is in the Public Arena that we see an opportunity for market transformation. The Internet, by enabling customer-centric, real-time pricing information to flow from the market to the end-user, has played a central role in the transformation of markets ranging from antiques to the New York Stock Exchange. Customer-centric, real-time links with electricity consumers are becoming more common in the deregulated utility industry, and are having a major impact on the consumption behavior of price-sensitive end-users (industrial facilities, for example). Water billing systems, which today typically disseminate billing and usage information on a monthly or quarterly basis, are ripe for similar changes. Increased price sensitivity could have a notable impact on water conservation.

Similarly, the water resource community has significant opportunities to enhance public outreach by distributing water quality information on the web in a timely and "user-friendly" way (consider the Charles River Watershed Association's inventive work). Making complex information available to the public, and using a variety of distance learning tools to educate key constituencies regarding water resource issues, is seen as a potential key to the establishment of sound and supportable policies.

In the Administrative Arena, we find that even basic tools for organizational collaboration (for example, Lotus Notes-type "groupware" applications for enabling group discussions and access to common databases) are not widely used in the water resource community. Installation of software that enables Intranet-type collaboration among a chain of related agencies is even less common. We know that in other settings -- at universities, for instance -- collaborative software has been used quite effectively to collect viewpoints and establish policy positions in an expeditious and efficient manner.

One area where the lack of intra- and inter-agency coordination is particularly striking is in data integration. For instance, agencies with complementary water quality data on a given stream or lake often find that they cannot combine or share the data due to incompatible data standards, differing database formats or language barriers. Our group was especially interested in the creation of common data standards and nomenclature, and the use of "data tagging" tools that allow complementary organizations to integrate data (e.g., the use of XML, or "eXtensible Markup Language," which is a further elaboration of the common HTML "HyperText Markup Language" format now used on the World Wide Web, appears to promising as a data integration tool).

We also found strong interest in portals and "virtual water fountains" for professional communities of practice, such as the WaterOnline site sponsored by VirtualNet (see www.wateronline.com ). By offering a variety of services to water resource managers (for example, by posting RFPs), these industry common spaces have evident value. Similarly, establishment of "best practices" databases that enable the sharing of expertise across geographically dispersed organizations was of considerable interest.

In the Natural Environment Arena, relevant and useful real-time data is at present available on the World Wide Web. The USGS, for example, offers daily, weekly and longer longitudinal views of water quantity data on its water.usgs.gov web site. The site, for instance, offers timely detail on low stream flows that have prevailed in New England during the droughty summer of 1999. This data is collected by the USGS stream-gauging program, mostly by way of satellite telemetry.

Water quality data, including water temperatures, chemistry, and levels of wildlife and human activity, are less current and harder to access. For instance, the most current national water quality data noted on the main USGS web site, as of August 1999, was derived from the 1995 National Stream Quality Accounting Network (NASQAN) and Hydrologic Benchmark Network (HBN) water quality analyses (see, for example, water.usgs.gov/pubs/FS/FS-013-97/ ). In addition, these data are available only on CD-ROM. The USGS is reportedly readying implementation of a system that will add water temperature and dissolved oxygen data for most of its 2,000 monitoring stations. The availability of such data may be of intense interest to resource managers, environmental advocates and recreational users (for instance, fishermen).

The continued development of relatively inexpensive wireless communications technology, as well as ever-more precise and inexpensive microprocessor-based sensors, sets the stage for increasingly pervasive, in-stream, real-time water quality monitoring networks. The challenge will be realizing the potential of the data. Certainly for wildlife biologists who are striving to understand the dynamics and causes for the decline of aquatic species, the availability of such data will be of great interest. Similarly, researchers trying to understand conditions that lead to outbreaks of "red tide" in the Gulf of Maine will be assisted by reliable, real-time data.

Workflow automation for the operations and management of water resource systems is, of course, not a new idea. The Internet and related wireless technologies, however, promise to take workflow automation efforts to a new level.

Consider the Sewer/Water Infrastructure Management System (SWIM) application developed by an affiliate of the City of San Diego (and now being marketed by a private firm), an impressive, PC-based service request management system (see www.sddpc.org/products/pswater.html for a product description). In essence, the SWIM system uses a database with mapping integration to help locate service sites and record work order information on a daily basis. Field personnel locate, initiate, update and close work orders with a "Swamped" -- a pen-based computer that accesses GPS information when plugged into a vehicle docking station. The work order information is uploaded to a central server every night when the crews return to their offices. To our knowledge, however, the Swamped system has not yet integrated wireless and Internet technologies to facilitate continuous system monitoring and updates.

We know that, in other industries, Internet and wireless technologies are facilitating ongoing communication of operating information between highly mobile workforces, vehicles and dispatchers. For example, for more than a decade, trucking industry dispatchers have been able to monitor trucks in real time; today, they can check a given truck’s location, speed, engine oil pressure, refrigerated trailer temperatures and such arcane matters as the truck’s state-by-state fuel taxes accrued (see, for example, a description of the Qualcomm Omnitracs technology at www.qualcomm.com/omnitracs/products/ ). The dispatchers can also stay in real-time contact with drivers via voice and data channels. With inexpensive sensors and wireless Internet networks, the opportunities ahead to similarly monitor and service complex water resource networks are very impressive.

Having convened our panel of New England experts from the public and private sectors, and having had a fruitful and wide-ranging exchange, we can envision several possible follow-on steps that could be undertaken anywhere in the country.

First, like two foreign nations trying to converse and confer, the water resources and Internet communities need to continue to learn how to communicate more effectively with each other. Three ideas come to mind here: 1) required, preparatory course work in electronic communications for all prospective water engineers and other water professionals; 2) short courses for established water resources personnel unfamiliar with the new technology; and 3) identification of a set of potential "translators" in research institutions or consulting firms able to serve as advisors and troubleshooters for on-line managers and policy-makers. Those electronic communications and data management professionals who seek to work with water resources groups should, in turn, be encouraged to learn some of the basics of the water resources field, such as basic hydrology and system management.

Second, to keep track of both the advances in electronic technology we foresee and the sheer pace of change likely to occur, water managers should consider establishing standing advisory groups of industry innovators and leaders, and convene them at regular intervals. There are a number of forms that such advisory groups can take. Many of them, in the name of "best practices," focus on stories around the "how" questions – for instance, "Let me tell you how I set up my beautiful new web site." We suggest that such forums can pack a more potent punch by focusing on stories about how various technologies are used to achieve relatively broad strategic purpose – for example, "Let me tell you how I used the Web and wireless technologies to achieve market transformation for the sale and distribution of water in my district," or "…how I used these technologies to educate end users and reduce unnecessary consumption of water." As this paper suggests, we believe that among the most interesting large scale changes that water resource managers will work towards in the next decade are: market transformation, enhanced public outreach, data integration and organizational coordination, the deployment of increasingly pervasive sensing capability, and workflow automation.

Third, water resources agencies should build stronger connections with existing "reservoirs" of knowledge and technical competence, in a manner similar to the university-based cooperative resources research units used so successfully in such related fields as fisheries, wildlife and forestry.

Finally, we are intrigued by the model of MIT's renowned Media Laboratory, a place where the best brains in academia join forces with industry to pioneer a host of innovative applications and new technologies. Why not one or more similar water resources communications laboratories, established regionally or nationally, to build and test prototypes of advanced electronic systems such as those we have discussed today? If the idea of such a laboratory gains traction, we suspect that New England will be among those regions seeking to be first in line to realize the concept.

Let me conclude by returning to the theme emphasized at the commencement of this talk: the most potential applications of the Internet in the water resources field appear to be ahead of us; to get them into the field, we need to keep focused on "where the puck is going."

We believe that the Internet can make a genuine difference in a variety of applications.

• In the public arena, customer-centric, real-time billing, coupled with time-of-use pricing, could be instrumental in transforming water markets, and in shaping water consumption patterns; similarly, opportunities to greatly enhance public outreach are at hand.
• In the administrative arena, advanced data formatting protocols for the web, including XML, offer real opportunities to achieve better data collection, integration, and dissemination; also, great strides in organizational coordination are achievable.
• In the monitoring of natural and built systems, low-cost sensors, inexpensive communications networks, and enhanced software promise substantial opportunities for real-time system monitoring and workflow automation.

We look forward, along with all of you, to seeing all of these applications blossom. Thank you so much for your interest and time here today.

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