Greg Bunce: Welcome to another episode of the Utah Geospatial Podcast. This is Greg Bunce.
Matt Peters: And I’m Matt Peters.
Greg Bunce: And we’re from the Utah Geospatial Resource Center. This podcast will be bringing you Geospatial news from across Utah.
Today on the podcast we talk with Aaron Austin from DNR’s Division of Water Resources. Aaron talks to us about how his agency went from clipboards in the field to now the reliance on satellite data. He also talks about how collaboration helped them build one of their most used layers, the water supplier boundary. We talk about their involvement in secondary water metering and also a bit on the water budget for the Great Salt Lake and what that means. This episode is the first in a three-part series that we’re doing on water here in Utah. So keep an eye out for our next episode where we talk with Lee Eschler from DNR’s Water Rights Division. But for now, let’s get on with the show.
Matt Peters: Welcome to the UGRC podcast again. Today we have Aaron Austin, and Aaron is with the Division of Water Resources within Natural Resources, the Department of Natural Resources. And there are seven divisions there and Aaron’s division is one of those. And I must admit Aaron, for many years, I remember you and I remember another colleague Barbara Perry who since long retired, and I was always kind of intrigued by what you guys did. And then I’ve seen you over the years and then you do the lunches at the City Creek Mall. And then also I noticed that big fat chunk of change your whole organization received for House Bill 429. So I’m glad we finally can sit and chat for a little bit now. And maybe just as a start, kind of tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of, I guess for me the first thing I knew you for was Water Related Land Use. And I know that you guys do more than that, but maybe you can just kind of introduce yourself and start us off about what your office does.
Aaron Austin: Yeah sure, thanks for having me. Excited to chat with you guys and be a part of this. I guess I’ll tell you about a little bit how I got into GIS and the water related land use is kind of a big part of my story and my life. I worked for Water Resources right out of high school as an intern. And it was kind of just this fun thing I got pulled into. They needed someone to go drive. And I went out on their field crews and this is back in the day when they had gigantic clipboards in the vehicle and a full-size quad map that they were marking while they drove around. So it was a different time. The people would wear sweats on the bottom to take care of the air conditioning and tank tops on top to be out in the sun cause they had this big clipboard that had cut them in half if they got in an accident. So that was my first exposure to working for Water Resources and water related land use. Did a little bit of digitizing on the old digitizing tables where we’d place those quad maps there and get them entered into the digital system.
But fast forward a couple years later, I was in college trying to do a degree in business. And that old job that I had came open again. So I went back to Water Resources and worked there part-time all through college and worked with that water related land use during that time as well. And then when I graduated with a degree in business, all the jobs that were available were sales jobs. And that wasn’t really something that interested me too much. And at the exact same time one of the GIS analysts for Water Resources quit. And I’d gotten to know Eric Edgley and we had a good working relationship. And I found that I kind of had an interest in what they were doing and I walked into his office and told him I wanted that job. So that led to six months of on the job training and the beginning of a career in GIS. So I went on to do water related land use for another 12 years I think after that.
Matt Peters: Wow. I am just, I don’t even know what you’d call it, flabbergasted. Amazed that yes, right out of high school and and I do remember days of quad maps, clipboards, uh things of that nature. Wow. I had no I had no clue of your history. Yeah.
Greg Bunce: So Aaron, was the whole clipboard and driving around in trucks, was that basically the ground, the days of ground observation for for land use before the satellites kicked in? Is that what you folks were doing out there?
Aaron Austin: Oh yeah. Yeah we’ve got a long interesting history to that program. And actually I’ll throw in there as well that my dad worked for Water Resources and he actually started the program. So way before I was involved, he took a group of people down to California to see how they were collecting agricultural data and water, you know water use on agriculture, and came back and started a program. So back in that day, you know big ground truth, even before we we could do it on the digitizing table, they would they would do those maps and then they would cut the papers out and weigh them to calculate the acreage. So it’s it’s got a interesting weird history and when I when I came back to Water Resources, that’s when Eric Edgley was kicking off some of the tablets in the field and and so we were taking ArcView out into the field and and digitizing and gathering that way finally. But yeah, I’ve done presentations at UGIC and things like that about the history of the program. Tom Moore has developed a nice story map about water related land use and like I said, more than a decade of my career, I like to talk about it, like to think about the intricacies of it. But as you mentioned, now we we actually used to spend a long time during the summer getting that ground truthing and try to do a full survey and that took us about six years to do the whole state. Now we’re we’re functioning off of the crop land data layer from the USDA and we do more of spot checks now. Spend a few weeks during the summer doing that. And we actually push our data to the USDA to inform their models and improve that layer. So so now we have much more sophisticated and up to date ways to do it which allows us to produce a yearly product. So that’s come a long ways in in the years I’ve been involved.
Greg Bunce: So these are currently now you’re so these are Landsat satellites that are using remote sensing and stuff. How does that so going back again, I don’t, you know, just curious about the clipboard days. Like how how did it work back then just briefly?
Aaron Austin: Yeah so the division paid for aerial flights. They would take those slides and they built a little box with a mirror and a piece of glass and they would set up a slide projector that that shot it into this setup and projected the aerial photos onto the quads. And then someone would sit there and trace that boundary information onto the quads. So yeah we were paying for our own flights, we were hand tracing things onto quads and it was, you know, ingenious way to handle it, but you know we’ve come a long ways.
Greg Bunce: Yeah. And I love the part where you’re cutting it out and then stacking them on top of each other and then weighing it to to kind of get the the acreage there. That that’s great. So the satellite so right now then just to clarify, so it is essentially satellites that are continuously operating and then this is coming down through the USDA and then you’re just building out the layers based on that.
Aaron Austin: Yeah so the crop land data layer I think is really heavily a Landsat based product. But the reason they can do something a lot of other people can’t is because they’re a sister agency to the Farm Service Agency. So they actually have training data sets that are agricultural information gathered from farmers that no one else can have. So they train their data sets and use the satellite information to produce that raster layer of of crops. And then like I said, I mean they use other inputs and other things and we’re now an input to that by by doing our field checks. But yeah, I mean in back east or in areas where there’s a lot of expansive crop land or or where there’s you know very well known crops, very common crops, they have a very high confidence level in in what they’re seeing on the ground with those satellites. And then and then we often try to to go out and visit things that are a little more unusual or or that don’t have as high a confidence level with their their methods so that we can be feeding data in that improves you know if there’s vegetable vegetable patches and orchards and and pastures are actually kind of hard. They’re not like such a uniform crop like other things. So we’re just melding together a few different things.
Greg Bunce: How about I’m looking at Salt Lake County right now on the the Utah Water Related Land Use map, the current one. And it is really an incredible map. And I’m looking at the Salt Lake County area and there’s a lot of information here on crop types and particularly I see grapes and it says four. Is that is that acreage? Is that percentage? What does that represent?
Aaron Austin: I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking at but but we definitely you know we’re we’re collecting the the bounds of the of the fields so we know how big it is. We’ve got the crop type. We’ve got irrigation types. And we’re also you know as we’re going through and digitizing what we’re seeing in in naip imagery and things like that, we’re picking out you know urban lands and other things. So I don’t know what the four refers to but I we’ve collected whether you’ve got you know grapes growing or or whatever. And and so it’s it’s been something that we collected because there wasn’t something there to tell us what agriculture was being grown. And then we’ve just always kind of shared that. That’s you know Matt mentions remembering me for that and it’s something we did early on that I’m proud of that we were very transparent and and shared that layer as much as we could. And people have used it for a lot of things. You know you you can learn a lot about wildlife you know they they sometimes use agriculture as as food and cover and and different things. And so if you’re trying to study different things around the state sometimes the agricultural layer is is very useful actually. So we’ve done some work to try to understand how it’s being used but for the most part it’s been so so much freely available that we often go into meetings and someone will say, “Look at this this great layer here,” you know and and we’ve never even heard that they’re using it in that way. So it’s always kind of fun.
Greg Bunce: Yeah. Something that just pops up at right away as I look at it is you see a lot of the urban areas are red, which is you know the the land use is urban, and then some of the rural areas many of them are green which is agriculture. However you see Park City and Moab, which are you know typically kind of rural areas, however they have a lot of urban land use scattered around. So that’s almost like an indicator to me of just resort towns or tourism.
Aaron Austin: Yeah. We we’re very generalized on the urban stuff. You know I don’t know things like a ski resort or a golf course or you know different things could fall into that. We in the early days for some reason they were you know marking out things like this is residential, this is commercial, this is industrial. And and at some point in the process I just said, “Look, people are starting to try to use this for like you know an understanding of how much land is industrial and and residential in the state and I was like we’re not doing a good job of of making sure we’ve categorized that correctly and so we better stop sharing that kind of information if we haven’t done a good job of informing the data set with it.” So so we kind of pulled that back and just made a lot of things kind of generalized urban. But yeah it’s it’s still you know if we’re updating it it’s kind of showing the change from agriculture to to urban or it’s showing you know the sprawl or the growth and so people still do use use it in a lot of ways but we’re not we’re not giving it a bunch of attributes that aren’t you know actually being determined by us.
Matt Peters: Wow. How how many people work with you on this issue?
Aaron Austin: So back in back in those days that we were doing the state in six years and we were doing it for months during the summer, we would we would enlist some of the engineers and our our whole team of tech services. And you might have I don’t know six to ten people do do travel and work during the summer. And now with with some of this automation and the and the spot checking, we can we can easily get away with maybe four or five people being involved over the year. And and Tom Moore that’s leading the program now, I mean in some ways like he’s doing most of it himself because he’s he’s utilizing some machine learning and and different things that it just speed up the process. It’s it’s fast now partly because of so much work that went into it in the past. You know we’ve we’ve gotten the linework and the data to a place where it needs minor minor additions, minor updates over time and you can sit there and work with it and and have kind of one person spending a good portion of their year instead of you know 10 or or more people spending a long portion digitizing and then a long portion in the field. So we did some work with Wade Kloos to categorize some return on investment. We got a poster that we did. And and really you know that many fewer people staying in hotels and driving vehicles and spending time is I think we had a give a more conservative ROI because the initial calculations were I don’t think anyone would believe. But it’s just it’s been a big process improvement and and even better more frequent data. So it’s been fun to see it evolve.
Matt Peters: And and so what you got like half a dozen GIS people and and a few other staff for this part?
Aaron Austin: So we have like I say one person that’s main work is the water related land use. We actually have a pretty big crew of GIS people for for as small as our division is. We’ve got you know 45 to 50 people at Water Resources and and there’s like six of us that have a GIS title and one of our people is a CAD person. But but yeah when I when I talk to other departments or divisions where you know they’ve got like 300 people and one GIS person, I feel pretty lucky. So.
Matt Peters: Yeah. I noticed you have a a water group as well on the website and I’m kind of looking through some of the notes from this group as they meet and one of the one of the recent things that kind of came up is secondary water system boundaries. Is that something you guys are working on or is that something you have already in house?
Aaron Austin: Yeah so um so the stuff with the Water Data Users Group has kind of been in flux. I I became the manager about four years ago of my section and um I don’t think we’ve had an official meeting since then. I still kind of have that as a as an email list. But it’s kind of it’s kind of been a little bit of an evolution. We we started that group in the early days because well one I mean I thought it was pretty awesome going to to SLUG meetings or UGIC stuff or or State GIS meetings and and sometimes I thought, “You know, I need a venue where I can discuss some of the water stuff, you know with with the data experts.” So I I pulled together a group of people and and held some meetings where people could present and just kind of followed the format of some of those other user groups. And what it led to most significantly was a collaboration that happened between Water Resources, Water Rights, Water Quality, it might have been Drinking Water actually, and and some people at the University that oh and also the AGRC at the time. The everyone was kind of making their own water supplier boundaries and we just said, “Hey, let’s all get together and talk and figure out how we can just make one of these layers and and make it official and have everything that everyone needs in it.” And we we volunteered to kind of be the stewards of that layer. Adam Clark has done that for a lot of years and and works on that. But that was awesome collaboration and and a very very useful layer that came out of it. And you know we’re now in a stage where people have made great use of that layer and now they want something similar for the secondary water, all the the landscape watering that’s happening in the state. And so building building off of the the team we built to to do that we’re we’re working with Water Rights and and actually so Matt Matt thinks our 5 million dollar thing was was a big deal. We got 250 million dollars for secondary water metering. So within that we were we had some money to to hire a new GIS analyst and and task him full time. His name is Jack Heinselman and he’s he’s kind of our full time secondary water metering GIS person now. So he’s pulling that together, working with Water Rights, working with Adam Clark. And and really it’s interesting, but you find out that we don’t really know where all these entities are or who they are. You know it’s not just that their boundary that we don’t have, we kind of have to find them for sure to begin with and and comply with the law and and get this money spent and get get those meters out there and installed. So it’s was the was the 250 million is that part of ARPA funds or and is that separate from the the HB 429 bill with the 5 million? Are those two separate things?
Aaron Austin: Yep. I think I think the first 50 million might not have been ARPA. I think it’s House Bill 242 something like that. And so 200 million I think is ARPA which means we got to spend it fast, get it contract quick, those kind of things. It’s it’s totally separate from House Bill 429 on the Great Salt Lake. So I’m actually working closely with that. That’s one of the nice things about where my GIS career has gone is I feel like I get to be heavily involved in in water topics as well not just the the GIS. So I’m assisting in our division on the effort to to contract for for that watershed assessment and the the bill is broken out in a few different ways but we’ve we’ve got to develop a work plan first and and we’re getting close to having that contract finalized and and from there it’s just going to be this really big effort to bring all the players together and to figure out where the gaps are in in our understanding of of how water gets to the lake. And Matt Matt reached out to me and and really I maybe I should have been more thinking this way but he gave me a good reminder that you know, “Hey, where you know where the gap’s going to be in in the GIS layers and and data?” And and definitely a portion of this could probably help fill those gaps. So we’re we’re going to be doing lots of collaboration, bringing together stakeholders and and figuring out what pieces we’re missing to really understand how to keep the lake healthy. So it’s pretty cool.
Matt Peters: Yeah I think that’s a real challenge you know, not not necessarily a money challenge at all, but it’s I feel it’s a challenge to take such a complex ecosystem and figure out what data can support it. But not only what data can support it but what data is actually needed that’s practical and actionable and you know that we can actually say, “Yes, if we have this data we can make this decision.” Yeah it’s I think that’s going to be a challenge.
Aaron Austin: Yep. Yeah for sure.
Greg Bunce: How do you guys how does your office play into the NHD? And and are you how does the more or less the 3DEP and the 3DHP, how does that affect the work that you folks do?
Aaron Austin: Yeah so that’s an interesting story too. You know we we as a water agency were we’re watching you guys up there kind of always pleading for some help with this NHD stuff. And I guess we took pity on on you guys on Rick up there and and we said, you know, maybe maybe it makes sense for us to be the steward here. And I had an employee at the time Jesse Pearson was really interested in it and and we we tried to take it on and get it started. Both Jesse and and Adam Clark spent some time trying to get trained in their functions and we kind of hit a lot of road blocks like you know they were they were having us roll back our versions of Arc ArcMap to older versions because their system was was kind of archaic and and then just you know time time crunch we we didn’t get to spend a lot of time on it and kind of felt bad about that. But there’s there’s kind of a new development that I just went to a meeting about that I guess takes a little bit of the pressure off us but recently they they did all their 3DEP their you know high accuracy elevation model stuff and what they’ve found is that now that they have that none of the NHD linework really matches the high resolution elevation stuff. So they’re going to to delineate those stream networks from the high resolution elevation stuff. Which is which is how it should work in hydrologic modeling right? You want your your streams to flow where the where the elevation dictates that it will. And from there they’ll have a much more consistent data set across the whole country because it matches their their elevation data and it doesn’t you know depend on each state having as good a program as the next. So it’s it should be a great improvement. It’s going to be really really great stuff. And we’re kind of Jesse’s moved on from us she’s over at Utah Geological Survey now and I got a new new people hired on that that can maybe keep an eye on this and and we can still be involved. But so we didn’t do a whole lot with it but it’s it’s moving beyond where where we would have had it anyway. So.
Matt Peters: Well Aaron, I definitely would encourage our listeners to check out a couple resources that you’ve shared with us. Particularly the Water Related Land Use Map, even the historical ones, and the 2020 Water Use Data app. Also definitely a plug into you guys with the story map that you put out there which is excellent story map. Is there any other resources that you’d want folks to hear about or is there an entry point that folks can come into? Or is it just a Google search? And and I’ll also put these links in the notes for the show.
Aaron Austin: Yeah for sure. I think kind of everything you just mentioned is all housed within what we call our Open Water Data Website. And you can kind of get the entry point to that by going to water.utah.gov/opendata. So yeah that’s just a jumping off point where you can look at the water budget stuff that was mentioned, water related land use. We’ve got some other pages on that that we’ve got a gallery of our maps. We’ve got other places you can go for water information. So that’s an Esri Hub site. It was called Open Data when I built it and then it’s it’s grown and other people have worked on it a lot since. David Gunther works on it now. But we yeah we kind of rolling everything up into there and it’s just a great resource and you know like you mentioned we’re able to embed the different apps. We’re able to to work with Open Data download interfaces. We’ve got story maps. We’ve got it’s kind of like a little web website builder and but it’s just kind of GIS centric so it’s a great great resource. Great thing people can check out.
Matt Peters: Yeah and it’s very well organized and very well done. Well thank you for giving us the time today and just filling us in on what’s happening over there. I I appreciate it.
Aaron Austin: Yeah it’s been fun.
Greg Bunce: Sounds like I need to put another City Creek lunch on the calendar. And that sounds like Matt’s committed to be there right?
Matt Peters: Sounds like it.