The Pittsburgh Water Collaboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, in collaboration with government agencies (USACE and PA DEP), local organizations (Upstream Pittsburgh and UrbanKind), and national organizations (The Internet of Water Coalition and The Center for Geospatial Solutions), are piloting a decision support tool for a water managers and decision-makers with a long-term goal of improving equitable access to clean rivers for drinking, habitat, and recreation across the Ohio River Basin.
The first phase is a year-long process of understanding user/stakeholders needs and incorporating their feedback into the prototype tool. The basic idea of the decision support tool, referred to as EQUATE, is to integrate river water quality observations from historical (back to 1984) and current satellites with a variety of socio-economic and environmental datasets into one platform that enables data visualization and mapping, spatial and trend analyses, data interpretation, and generation of custom data reports.