By Helen Fitanides
For the last few months, we’ve been working with Flow West to build an app that brings together our monitoring data with that of other groups, and presents it in an interesting and interactive way. We’re happy to announce that the app is now live! Please visit it here, and read below for a tour of the app.
On the main page of the app you can learn about all of the water quality features that we monitor in a creek, which have been grouped according to type, such as vital signs, which includes temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, conductivity, and turbidity. Click on a grouping to learn more about it – for example, if you select nutrients, you can learn about eutrophication and dead zones, as well as the differences between the different types of nutrients that we measure.
Scroll down on the page to see a map of our water quality monitoring locations grouped by watershed. We’ve also listed sites where other groups monitor water quality, and sourced their data from the California Environmental Data Exchange Network or CEDEN, which is also the final destination for our data. Click on a watershed, or a creek listed on the left of the map, to explore further.
Each creek has a home page where you can learn about the length of the creek as well as other interesting facts about it, such as how much of the watershed is natural vs. covered in impervious surfaces such as roads and houses. This information was sourced from the Contra Costa Watershed Atlas, which has much more information about each of these watersheds. We’ve also graded the features that we measure in the creek; hover over the red or yellow grades to learn about the feature and why it may not be at healthy levels. You can check out our About page, linked in the upper right of each page, to learn more about our methods and how we calculated grades.
From a creek’s home page you can explore sampling sites associated with that creek, and see graphs of each water quality feature that we measure at that site. You can also compare features at multiple sites in the watershed, such as comparing temperature at several tributaries and the main stem of the creek. Click and drag on the chart to zoom in, and click “more details” to see more information on the features and their healthy levels.
We hope you enjoy exploring Contra Costa Creeks! If you have any questions or would like to learn more, please contact Helen at helen@thewatershedproject.org. Funding for this project came from the California Environmental Protection Agency and the Rose Foundation, and we want to especially thank Sadie Gill and Anthony Falzone from the Flow West team for building the app.
