Project Goals  

With the watershed approach to management becoming a dominant paradigm in environmental protection and the Worldwide Web a dominant educational medium, there is clearly widespread need for model web sites for watershed management education for the many watershed-based groups in New Jersey.  Our web site with multi-media, watershed education content, data unique to New Jersey’s watersheds and monitoring groups, and advanced web technology may serve as one of these models.  Much of the technology we develop will be readily transferable to other watershed education efforts.

The purpose of this web site is  

  • To educate interested citizens and students in watershed issues and

  • To provide a means for online volunteer water monitoring data entry, sharing and correlating with land use.  

Learning Center

Learning Center focuses on important watershed problems in urbanized areas, such as nonpoint source pollution, flooding, degraded stream habitat, stream bank erosion and limited riparian buffers.  The purpose of education is to first inform residents about watershed problems and then enable and encourage critical-thinking and decision-making skills to understand and evaluate causes, effects and alternative solutions.  Web site users will be enabled to become more active participants in watershed management and stewardship functions and advocacy.  Organizations and members participating in water monitoring efforts throughout the state will be enabled to enter their data online and correlate it with watershed features.

Monitoring Center

Monitoring Center focuses on providing a means of entering and accessing water quality monitoring data by diverse water quality volunteers from the watershed areas throughout New Jersey State.   Volunteer monitoring groups will be able to enter water quality parameters and interact with location-based data via map interface as well as text interface.  The data Information of how to meet the NJDEP criteria for water quality data and a list of parameters are also provided.