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Watershed and Economic Data InterOperability (WEDO): Facilitating Discovery, Evaluation and Integration through the Sharing of Watershed Modeling Data
Citation:
Johnston, JohnM, M. Galvin, R. Parmar, AND C. Foley. Watershed and Economic Data InterOperability (WEDO): Facilitating Discovery, Evaluation and Integration through the Sharing of Watershed Modeling Data. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-16/218, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
Watershed Economic Data InterOperability (WEDO) helps to support the mission of the NERL by offering a new way to support discovery and integration of watershed modeling data. Through the use of WEDO and its Web-based database, modelers can publish their detailed modeling studies to a centralized place, which can be downloaded by other modelers for use in their various studies and research. This is an important step forward to environmental exposure science because it allows for further discover, evaluation and integration of watershed modeling data to help improve watershed integrity across the United States.
Description:
Watershed and Economic Data InterOperability (WEDO) is a system of information technologies designed to publish watershed modeling studies for reuse. WEDO facilitates three aspects of interoperability: discovery, evaluation and integration of data. This increased level of interoperability goes beyond the current practice of publishing modeling studies as reports or journal articles. Rather than summarized results, modeling studies can be published with their full complement of input data, calibration parameters and output with associated metadata for easy duplication by others. Reproducible science is possible only if researchers can find, evaluate and use complete modeling studies performed by other modelers. WEDO greatly increases transparency by making detailed data available to the scientific community.WEDO is a next generation technology, a Web Service linked to the EPA’s EnviroAtlas for discovery of modeling studies nationwide. Streams and rivers are identified using the National Hydrography Dataset network and stream IDs. Streams with modeling studies available are color coded in the EnviroAtlas. One can select streams within a watershed of interest to readily find data available via WEDO. The WEDO website is linked from the EnviroAtlas to provide a thorough review of each modeling study. WEDO currently provides modeled flow and water quality time series, designed for a broad range of watershed and economic models for nutrient trading market analysis. Modeling studies are packaged for download and easy integration into work flows and to reproduce results.EPA developed WEDO for anyone interested in publishing watershed modeling studies for wide dissemination and reuse. EPA’s STOrage and RETrieval (STORET) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Information System (NWIS) are examples of nationwide repositories for sharing monitoring data on water resources. However, no such system exists for modeling studies. We provide a number of step-by-step examples of discovery and publishing in this guide. WEDO addresses extra information requirements for storing and publishing modeled data. The vision for WEDO is a flexible repository for those interested in locating modeling studies and economic data necessary to evaluate the feasibility for nutrient trading in a watershed or river basin of interest—without having to know where to locate the information from various reports and academic literature.