Watershed Restoration Initiative
Tools for creating, tracking, and implementing watershed improvement projects
Why
WRI is a partnership among state and federal government agencies, private and public landowners, and non-profit organizations with the purpose of actively restoring and rehabilitating Utah’s diverse landscape and waters to promote healthy and resilient ecosystem function and biodiversity. Project origination and implementation occur at a local level, where there is the most direct knowledge of both the challenges facing an area of need, and the solutions to correct them. Five regional teams elect their own leaders; develop proposals across administrative boundaries; review, score and rank project proposals using a comprehensive prioritization score sheet; and assist their members with project implementation and management.
To facilitate this cooperative effort, a web application was developed to track the lifecycle of projects, summarize program metrics, and enable participation from team members throughout the state. UGRC’s development team was a natural fit for the application due to the spatial nature of WRI project data.
Project Highlights
The WRI application was the first project to match UGRC and Utah Division of Technology Services (DTS) software engineers. UGRC built and integrated map functionality into DTS’s Java, forms-over-data application by incorporating browser-based, desktop GIS style spatial data editing and analysis with complex business and topology rules. The partnership among the Division of Wildlife Resources, DTS, and UGRC to build and deploy the application proved to be successful, and award-winning.