This project was funded by a Capacity Support Grant from the MWCC Watershed Fund.

Project Description

YVFC works with a variety of partners to monitor watershed health, guided by the 2015 Kootenai River Basin Watershed Restoration Plan. Our Headwaters Restoration Partnership program works throughout the Kootenai River watershed, gathering data on aquatic invasive species (AIS), water quality, stream temperature, and sediment sources.

We would like to make these data accessible to watershed partners and the public by creating a “Kootenai Watershed Dashboard”, a user-friendly dashboard in ArcGIS that will allow for all watershed monitoring data to be published in one location, providing our watershed partners and our community a comprehensive and in-depth look at all watershed health.

While AIS and water quality data for the Kootenai River Basin are published to the MTFWP AIS dashboard and MT-eWQX databases by agency partners, much of the data collected by YVFC is not accessible to the public. As a small organization that began monitoring the watershed over 20 years ago, outdated equipment and software has presented a major challenge to accessing and analyzing historical data. Decades worth of stream temperature readings, sediment source inventories, and BEHI/NBS surveys are currently sitting in filing cabinets and on flash drives where they are essentially unusable. Creation of a dashboard to house these data will allow watershed partners to easily view and analyze data, identify gaps and redundancies in watershed monitoring, and allow for future monitoring programs to be easily integrated into the dashboard.

The dashboard will also address the public education and outreach priorities of the 2015 KRB WRP. This aspect of the program is particularly important now, as Lincoln County’s population has grown nearly 19% since 2020 and is one of the fastest growing counties in Montana. While many residents and visitors are quick to celebrate the area’s “pristine” waters, increased development and recreation pose a serious threat to watershed health. Communicating existing water quality and habitat issues with the public is difficult when people are seeing what they perceive to be “clean” waterways. Having these data available to the public in one central location, with interactive features and real-time updates will serve as a powerful tool to visualize threats to the watershed. With this tool in place, we hope that landowners will be more open to implementing riverbank restoration projects and best practices on their properties to address existing impairments and emerging threats to watershed health.

Project Outcomes and Impacts

Project in progress