Spotlight On: Ipswich River Watershed Association

The Ipswich River watershed connects 21 Massachusetts communities. Image from IRWA.

The Ipswich River is located in Northeastern Massachusetts. With 45 miles of a meandering path from its source to the sea, the watershed of this river includes at least a part of 21 Massachusetts communities. Since 1997, volunteers from the Ipswich River Watershed Association's (IRWA) Riverwatch Program have collected data to record the conditions of the river.

The IRWA began publishing its data from the Riverwatch Program in HIS earlier this year in order to make the data more publicly accessible. This web service is unlike many of the web services registered with HIS Central because it is a citizens' group rather than academic researchers or a government agency that is publishing data. The variables being observed in this case are water temperature and dissolved oxygen.

There are 34 sites with observations along the Ipswich River in the IRWA web service, which can be seen in this screenshot from HydroDesktop.

The two aforementioned variables (water temperature and dissolved oxygen) are measured at 34 different sites along the Ipswich River, which can be seen in the above screenshot from HydroDesktop. The darkened polygon is the coverage of the Ipswich River watershed as delineated using the EPA Watershed Delineation Tool.

The IRWA web service is an excellent example of how HIS can enable data publication from a variety of sources. These sources are often government agencies or academic researchers, but examples such as the IRWA contribute to HIS being in a unique position as a one stop portal for water data.

For more on the Ipswich River, visit the IRWA website.