Records Preservation

An all too common and tragic occurrence in river health assessment is the loss of documents, graphics, websites, and datasets over time. This may result during organization transitions, computer upgrades, or website transfers. Given the amount of time, money, and effort that goes into a river health assessment, dependable document hosting and archiving of data, results, and reporting is a valuable consideration. Although NGOs and ad-hoc stakeholder groups often coordinate river health assessments, these groups frequently have short organizational lifetimes and are not well-suited to document and data preservation. A local government or a similar entity is a preferable home for documents and hosted web materials.

Data Publication

Where possible, newly collected or generated quantitative data sets (e.g., water quality sample analysis results, macroinvertebrate community indices) data can and should be archived in digital repositories for long-term preservation and publication. Example repositories include the Water Quality Portal, Colorado’s AWQWMs database, DataONE, and CUAHSI-HIS. Preserving data and information for future use by local stakeholders and/or regional research efforts is one of the more valuable actions that any river health assessment can undertake.