WATERS

WATERS (Watershed Assessment Tool for Education & Research Studies) is a free platform for managing water quality data collected by organizations in the upper Ohio River basin. It was created by 3RQ to serve groups as a useful tool for safely storing and retrieving their data. WATERS is hosted by the West Virginia Water Research Institute via Amazon Web Services. 

Some of the key features include:

• WATERS is fully mobile and can be viewed on Android, iPhone, and iPad. The system detects your device and returns the screen most compatible. Not only can you view it, but you can upload data while in the field, vastly reducing data entry time. 
• A user-friendly query screen allows users to search for values falling within specified ranges of their choosing (e.g., pH between 2 and 6) to key in on specific datasets. The data output can be viewed online or exported to Excel.
  
• Field and Lab summary reports allow users to find minimum, maximum, and averages for the parameters and date-ranges of their choosing with the click of a mouse. Data is also displayed visually in graphs.
• Logger data can be uploaded from one Excel spreadsheet using a profile for each site. Logger data can be exported as either daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly averages.
• Historic and bulk lab data can be uploaded from one Excel spreadsheet by the database manager. 
• There will never be a charge for utilizing WATERS and data will be stored into perpetuity.
• Data stored in WATERS is shared publicly via 3RQ's online maps.

To learn more, watch the recorded WATERS presentation from our 3RQ Virtual Roundtable Series (19:20 - 30:00).

WATERS is constantly seeking feedback from its users and supporters to upgrade its current features. In March of 2023, WATERS received significant upgrades making it easier than ever to upload data. Using the ‘Multi-Data Import’ function, users can now upload multiple types of data/multiple sites at one time. WATERS currently accepts data for the following parameters (new parameters as of 2023 are in bold).

Lab Parameters:

Contact Lisa Barreiro, the Database Manager at lisa.barreiro@gmail.com to create an account and begin using WATERS.

Click here to view/download the WATERS fact sheet.