Enhancing Watershed Research Capacity: The Role of Data Management.

Water resources are under growing pressure globally, and in the face of projected climate change, changes in precipitation frequency and intensity; evapotranspiration, runoff, and snowmelt pose severe societal challenges. Interdisciplinary environmental research across natural and social sciences to address challenges in water resource management will require complex and long-term data.  The Agricultural Research Service supports a unique set of long-term research watersheds that can contribute to such analyses.  To effectively retrieve embedded information/knowledge from watershed studies, and apply to national scale hydrological research, a web-based data system, STEWARDS, was developed, to overcome problems of fragmentation, inadequate documentation, and cumbersome manipulation.   This paper will discuss the role of data management in enhancing watershed research capacity, the evolving information technologies that are available to improve watershed data management, and strategies and approaches taken in STEWARDS to compile, document and provide access to data from loosely coupled research watersheds across the ARS program.