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Development of a Geospatial Database for Water Planning

This is a two year project to develop, evaluate and document a digital geospatial database to support water allocation planning and watershed assessment in Connecticut and to develop a GIS supported assessment framework. The planned project database is designed to address data needs that were identified by a special workgroup of the Connecticut Water Planning Council that was charged with looking at water allocation issues. The GIS database developed through this project will be available to federal, state, regional and municipal governmental units, utilities, and other interested stakeholders. 

While no specific assessment tools will be developed, the project will investigate the use of standardized geoprocessing procedures implemented with ESRI’s ModelBuilder to provide a flexible yet repeatable assessment framework. Initial tasks are to acquire, organize and assess the datasets listed below to generate summary statistics for watersheds as defined in the Watershed Boundary Dataset.

The project team also is working to adapt a USGS program that automatically delineates watersheds to a user selected point along a stream or river and calculates a set of metrics for the watershed. This capability will allow the calculation of metrics for watersheds that drain to any user selected location within the state.

To view basic metrics for all of Connecticut's 240 HUC12 watersheds in Google Earth (file size ~2.5 MB), click here. The file includes a summary of the following metrics by watershed: area, miles of roads, road density, miles of stream, stream density, number of stream crossings, 2000 population, and 2001 land cover statistics.

• Water & Natural Resources
  • Watershed Boundary Dataset (WBD aka HUC12s)
  • Hydrography
  • Estimated streamflow
  • 2001 Land cover
  • Native fish habitat
  • Ortho imagery
  • Precipitation data
  • Soils
  • Stocked streams
  • Surficial materials
  • Topography
• Demographics
  • 2000 Census Block population counts
  • 2000 Population density
• Infrastructure
  • Roads
  • Culverts
  • Dams
  • Sewered areas
  • Water utility service areas
• Administrative
  • Administrative boundaries
  • Aquifer protection areas
  • Committed open space
  • Wild and scenic river designations
• Water Uses
  • Discharges - permitted and actual
  • Diversion withdrawals
  • Potential future water supplies
  • Water company interconnections and sales of excess water
• Monitoring and Assessment
  • USGS Gaging stations
  • Safe yields
  • Areas experiencing or anticipating significant growth
  • 303D and 305B water quality limited streams
  • Endangered species
  • Surface and ground water quality classifications