A data-driven feedback loop
Real-world applications for Canada1Water
As General Manager of Conservation Ontario, Angela Coleman sees abundant opportunities for Conservation Authorities to get value from C1W — and to give back in return.
Boots on the ground - Staff at the South Nation River Conservation Authority actively monitor environmental conditions to provide ongoing sources of accurate local data.
Q: WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IS MOST ON THE MINDS OF CONSERVATION AUTHORITIES IN ONTARIO THESE DAYS?
Angela Coleman: There’s no single hot-button issue. But what you see in the news — fires, flooding, water quality — are widespread concerns. Ontario is generally blessed with good, high-quality groundwater and surface water, but we need to understand what’s changing and why so we can continue to be effective stewards into the future.
Q: HOW CAN CANADA1WATER HELP WITH THAT?
Angela: We need as many forms of data as possible to make decisions. Our accountability framework calls for that. There’s a push for open data, for citizen access. People want to know what decisions are based on. Canada1Water will help with all of that because data inputs and outputs will be published under an open data license. And it’s objective, as objective as data can be. We may not have perfect answers to every question about climate change, land management and economic development, but Canada1Water gives us more data to work from.
Q: AQUANTY’S WATERSHED MODEL FOR THE SOUTH NATION CONSERVATION AUTHORITY, WHICH WAS DEVELOPED WHEN YOU WERE DIRECTOR THERE, WAS AN IMPORTANT PRECURSOR TO CANADA1WATER. WHAT DID YOU TAKE AWAY FROM BEING PART OF THAT?
Angela: It was a great example of what a holistic model can do, and what a multidisciplinary partnership can achieve. Aquanty worked with IBM on that, and funding came from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. They built a fully integrated groundwater and surface water model with weather forecasting to determine the likelihood of floods and droughts. That helped us better manage the use of water sources in the watershed, and to balance competing uses — drinking water versus agriculture, for example.
Angela Coleman is General Manager of Conservation Ontario, the province’s association for Conservation Authorities.
Q: DO YOU THINK THAT’S A PARTICULAR VALUE OF CANADA1WATER, THAT IT’S HOLISTIC, AS YOU SAY, BUT ALSO HAS THE RESOLUTION TO BE VERY REGIONALLY SPECIFIC?
Angela: Absolutely. The model is a great place to start local dialogue, to get communities thinking about what they can do. Conservation Authorities are leaders on the ground in collecting data for predictive modelling and for provincial groundwater–surface water monitoring networks. Canada1Water will give a more complete, integrated picture to work with, and Conservation Authorities can augment that by collecting even more precise local data. There’s an opportunity to establish an extremely valuable feedback loop. The more data we have, the better the models we have.
Q: IS THERE ANY ONE THING ABOUT CANADA1WATER YOU’RE PERSONALLY MOST EXCITED ABOUT?
Angela: It shows collaborative innovation and how Conservation Authorities can be part of getting something big like this off the ground. Conservation Authorities in Ontario have been at this for a long time, and this is a made-in-Ontario project. Local data collection makes for better implementation and environmental protection. I’m honoured I got to be involved in laying the groundwork at South Nation Conservation. We worked hard on that project and now it’s being extrapolated into Canada1Water. It’s very exciting.
“There’s a push for open-source data, for citizen access. People want to know what decisions are based on. Canada1Water will help with all of that because it’s available to everyone.”