The goal of the Midwest Partnership for Watershed Management Decision
Support Systems is to develop, promote, and disseminate web-based
spatial decision support systems to help manage watersheds in the
Midwest. In particular, our aim is to make these systems freely available
via the Internet to local officials, natural resource managers, and
the general public.
Local watershed management forms the basis for continued economic
development and environmental improvement in the United States. Success
depends on an integrated approach that brings together scientific,
education and training advances made across many individual disciplines
and modified to fit the needs of the individuals and groups who must
write, implement, evaluate and adjust their watershed management projects.
Many communities cannot afford even the most basic approach to,
or initial screening of, their environmental problem and need cost
effective, user friendly tools to assist them. Existing information
and analytic tools, properly presented and freely accessible, can
help meet this challenge. Watershed management data and decision
support tools can allow informed screening and preliminary selection
of alternatives, eliminating large amounts of preliminary "leg
work".
In a time of limited local resources, a cost effective approach
to watershed management planning that provides access to free, coherently
organized, scientifically based information is sorely needed. The
partnership aims to provide the maximum information and analytic
tools to those levels of government closest to the actual problems.
It offers both direct access to its own free web-based decision
support tools and road maps to other sites where additional tools
can be found.
|