Malchus B. Baker

Sharing Watershed Information through the World Wide Web

There is a continuing need to increase awareness about the contributions of watershed management to conservation, sustainable development, and the appropriate use of natural resources. These contributions are essential to good land stewardship in the 21 st century. Computer technologies can assist in the storage, retrieval, and summarization of watershed-based data on the World Wide Web. Such information is useful to managers when planning and implementing watershed management practices, to researchers when testing and validating predictive models, and to educators when teaching about hydrologic processes. Watershed information from the Beaver Creek watershed in north central Arizona has been incorporated into a Web site to illustrate the accessibility of such data. These particular data represent natural resource responses to watershed management practices in ponderosa pine forest and pinyon-juniper woodland types in the Southwest. Documenting and retrieving images, publications, and reports produced during the Beaver Creek Watershed project using various parameters, such as keywords, dates, and locations, is also part of this Web site. This paper illustrates the procedures used to store, retrieve, and summarize Beaver Creek watershed-based data on the World Wide Web.