Step 2: Characterize Your Watershed (cont.)

Creating a Data Inventory
As you are collecting all existing data, create an inventory to determine what you have and identify where additional data is needed (data gaps). If you do have data gaps, look to your stakeholders and public resources for assistance with data collection needs. Some members of your group might already be collecting the types of data you need. If you don’t have immediate access to such resources, look to public resources such as your local and state government, other watershed groups, universities and volunteer monitoring groups.

The most likely types of data to be gathered are tabular data (e.g., monitoring data), reports and anecdotal information, and GIS data. For each of the datasets, you should document the important characteristics to identify and summarize the data. It is often useful to create the lists in a spreadsheet, such as Microsoft Excel, or a database, such as Microsoft Access. Spreadsheets are easy to use, but you can’t search or query the data as you can in a database. Creating the data inventory in a spreadsheet, or even in a word processing program (e.g., Microsoft Word), is adequate. However, if you have a large amount of data and would like to be able to query the data, for example, by keyword or content type, you should use a database program for the inventory.