Flooding, disappearing wetlands, and polluted water are familiar issues to communities across Long Island Sound—but they’re upstream, too.
The same challenges exist throughout the Long Island Sound watershed, which extends between stream and river networks from the Connecticut River in Quebec to the Sound’s groundwater area by New York City. Research throughout the region already tackles environmental hazards but is scattered across various sources, making it hard to find and connect data. US Geological Survey’s digital tool, the Long Island Sound Clearinghouse, is combating this challenge.
The Long Island Sound Clearinghouse is a hub that brings environmental data from across the watershed into a single, interactive tool. Funded by the Long Island Sound Partnership, the tool is less like a database and more like a guided map to help people discover new data and bridge it to their own work.
The Clearinghouse has two components: a map and a search page. If a user wants to find wetlands in Massachusetts where students can remove invasive plant species, they can toggle the map’s various layers. Each layer links back to the original data source.
For a user who wants specific data, they can use the search page to browse data by state and category. In this case, the user can use that data to build new educational programming, among other resources.
“We’re not hosting the data. We’re pointing out the right direction for the data you need and providing the context for you to spatially walk through it,” said Chris Schubert, a hydrologist with the US Geological Survey. Schubert, along with USGS supervisory hydrologist Denise Argue, is a USGS coordinator for Long Island Sound.
Like science, the Internet is always changing. Broken links and new studies mean regular website maintenance. That ongoing work is the project’s main challenge. But this is where user collaboration is handy, working with data sources themselves rather than keeping all information stored in one place. While researchers have obvious stakes in the Clearinghouse, it’s really a tool designed for anyone to learn more about the watershed, including the public.
“We view this as being a long-term tool that’s going to require long-term support, but also a tool that is as efficient and sustainable as possible for everyone’s benefit,” Schubert added.
The goal is not just to make research easier to find, but to illustrate a better picture of the watershed that the research describes.
The US Geological Survey anticipates providing trainings for the clearinghouse this summer. To learn about research in the watershed near you, find the clearinghouse here.
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