Russian River Watershed Atlas helps track and coordinate post-fire activities

Fire recovery in the Russian River Watershed will benefit from a common online platform for compiling, visualizing, and interpreting many kinds of environmental data available from diverse federal, state, regional, and local sources. Providing such a platform is one objective of the Russian River Regional Monitoring Program (R3MP). To meet this objective in the most immediately helpful way possible, the North Coast Regional Water Board is supporting the beta development of a R3MP web tool (r3mp.ecoatlas.org) designed specifically to help the Russian River community of environmental agencies and NGOs target, coordinate, track, and evaluate post-fire response and recovery efforts, especially with respect to monitoring stormwater BMPs and protective measures for drinking water intake facilities.
The R3MP web tool will add value to existing federal, state, regional, and local datasets, without replacing or duplicating any existing efforts to develop or compile data. To help assure its maximum value, the web tool will be developed with advice and review from a local work group of the R3MP. This initial effort will quickly create new capacity to plan, track, and summarize post-fire recovery efforts across public programs at all levels of government for any user-defined area within the Russian River watershed. The web tool can be later adapted to serve individual environmental regulatory and management programs.
To develop a functional R3MP web tool as quickly as possible, the existing California EcoAtlas toolset will be adapted to the Russian River Watershed. EcoAtlas (ecoatlas.org) is a public, science-based, online mapping and data management system developed through the California Water Quality Monitoring Council to implement its Wetland and Riparian Area Monitoring Plan (WRAMP). Environmental agencies and NGOs in many regions of the state are using EcoAtlas to advance their programs. EcoAtlas includes a variety of tools for generating new environmental information at any user-defined scale. For its initial application in the Russian River Watershed, EcoAtlas will feature three tools:
- California Aquatic Resources Inventory (CARI)
- Project Tracker
- CD3
Custom applications will reflect local and regional information needs.
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