Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2017NM186B

Geographic Information Systems for Water Resources Research Planning

Institute: New Mexico
Year Established: 2017 Start Date: 2017-03-01 End Date: 2018-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $38,698 Total Non-Federal Funds: $55,167

Principal Investigators: Alexander Fernald

Project Summary: As use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has grown and presented new opportunities, it also has raised a number of new issues. Of increasing concern is the management of a growing collection of spatial data sets and applications programs. These data sets and programs are very expensive to produce but relatively easy to share, so there is a great incentive to avoid duplicating production efforts. The trend clearly is toward managing these elements in distributed spatial libraries. Government and private agencies as well as the general public are potential clients who have need of GIS water data and/or mapping services to assist with regional water planning, management and other decision- making tasks. The New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute has become the focal point for geographic information system (GIS) data and information concerning water resources in New Mexico. It combines database management with digital mapping into spatial-tabular data models. These models are powerful tools for representing and manipulating earth- science information.