West Virginia NHD 2012 Evan FedorkoEvan Fedorko March 2012March 2012 Kanawha Falls, WV; aka NHD Area Rapids #

Outline WV’s NHD Stewardship Program Project Review 2012 Project Overview Progress So Far Challenges 2

Stewardship in WV WV GIS Technical Center WV Office of GIS Coordination Natural Resource Analysis Center USGS NHD Stewardship WV NHD Steward Technical Lead Technical Partner Evan FedorkoJackie Strager WVDEP Office of Water Resc. Contributor Chris Daugherty 3

Project Two principal goals: – Program establishment – Edits and Updates On establishment; – Focus has been on outreach; numerous meetings held, presentations given, promotional material distributed, etc. – Interest in NHD stewardship is difficult to pin down 4

Project 2010 – 11 (2) On editing; – USGS visited WV for training Dec – Virtual machine environment and software setup was slow – Two active editors; each completed just one HUC – Editing, too, was slow; technical issues requiring contact with USGS were frequent and learning curve was steep – We were unsatisfied with our own progress 5

2012 Project Overview Basic goal: address data and policy issues associated with high change areas 6

2012 Project (2) Fast facts: – miles of stream destroyed by surface mining – Unknown additional quantity via other land use change – No single dataset of buried streams exists – Related datasets (fills, mine boundaries, etc) useful in discovery need assessed for usefulness and accuracy 7

2012 Project (3) Goals summarized: – Find streams – Generate policy and best practices for editing these streams – “Plan ahead” Each of these statements is a Hemingway iceberg… 8

Finding Streams Review of 5 datasets purporting to depict surface mining (+3 smaller area datasets) Intersected with HR NHD and reviewed 10% of intersecting features to determine accuracy Intersecting feature intersected features test features features that need edits percentage valley fills (2009) % refuse structures (2009) % permit boundaries (released or phase rel only) % skytruth MTR areas % fill analysis data (WVDEP, Shank 2009) % 9

Finding Streams (2) First cut of source datasets established Coordination with other agencies on this subject ongoing – Other disturbance; roads, urban dev’t, etc. Summer 2012: Catalog streams in need of edits; stand alone dataset 10

Best Practices Key facts and queries: – “Replacement drainage” is not recorded digitally – How permanent are these structures? – Are they visible on photos? Is digitization feasible? – What are the opinions of hydro researchers on this subject? (interest in and importance of these features) – How thorough should the feature level metadata be? Dates, mine names, permit numbers, etc. 11

Best Practices (2) BP’s will (likely) be written on a “case” basis, depending on source data availability. Examples: – Stream buried by mine: delete reach – Stream buried by valley fill: replace reach with rock rip raps (if visible) – Stream altered due to road construction or urban dev’t: replace with agency provided data (culverts, etc) Automated feature extraction 12

Planning Ahead Can we anticipate where edits will need to be made? WVDOT, WVDEP Key components: – Selling the value of NHD – “inserting” NHD into agency workflows 13

Stewardship Errata Re-starting editing post-conference Outreach continues – Dave Arnold leading a training session at WV GIS Conference (general NHD, HEM, NHD Plus) – Widespread use of HR NHD is still an unrealized goal in WV 14

Conclusions WV NHD Stewardship is: THANKS! Questions? Evan Fedorko WV GIS Technical Center Photo credit: National Geographic 15