Environmental Database Design, Development and Application in the Cedar Creek Watershed.

Hydrologic modeling and monitoring of hydrologic processes across multiple scales is a fundamental component of many environmental and natural resource issues. In an effort to address such issues, an environmental monitoring network has been established in the 70,820 ha Cedar Creek Watershed, located in northeastern Indiana, which is the largest tributary of the St. Joseph River that supplies drinking water to approximately 250,000 people in the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana. As part of the USDA Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP), the National Soil Erosion Research Laboratory began collecting water quality samples in 2002 for the watershed. Each year on average, over 3,500 water samples and 300,000 environmental observations are obtained from 12 automated water quality monitoring sites within the upper 30,000 ha of Cedar Creek Watershed. This volume of data requires extensive database management to efficiently store and retrieve data. Water samples are processed to measure nutrients, herbicides, sediment, and pH with results stored in an analyte database. Flow data was also measured at each site and imported into the analyte database. Algorithms within the database merge the water flow data with the analyte concentration data to calculate analyte loss from each subbasin. There are five weather, stream flow, and soil moisture monitoring stations and seven stations monitoring stream flow and precipitation located within the watershed.  Data are recorded every 10 minutes and transmitted hourly to a database which can be retrieved via a web-based interface. Cropping, tillage and management information, collected from producer surveys, are stored in a geodatabase. The databases are designed to support the laboratory’s SWAT and AnnAGNPS modeling efforts, as well as a variety of experimental research studies. The local project database is designed to be incorporated into the National CEAP STEWARDS database.