Why is NetMap Community Based?

NetMap is a “community based” watershed analysis system. “Community” refers to the wide range of stakeholders that have varied interests in the watershed sciences and applied watershed management involving forestry, fisheries, wildfire, monitoring, restoration, research and education. Advantages of community based watershed science system include:

- Shared effort: When contributing to development of a geographically extensive uniform database, agencies and groups can pool their resources, thereby greatly reducing the cost of databases and analysis tools. It can provide smaller groups, such as local watershed councils, with the data and tools they could not otherwise afford.

- Strength in numbers: NetMap leverages the intellectual and financial capital of the many and puts that advantage into the hands of individual users, watershed analysts and stakeholders in the form of analysis tools, digital watershed databases and reference materials.

- Community forums: Access to a uniform and geographically extensive landscape attribute database allows users in different places and with different questions to access similar types of information in a consistent format. Dissemination of information through on-line forums can create a unique educational environment about watershed processes and resource management. It can also encourage increased communication and collaboration.

- Wikiesque: As institutions commission new watershed coverage and/or new analysis tools, the databases and customized tool upgrades are made immediately available to all users.

- NetMap community of users. Include NOAA-Fisheries, U. S. Forest Service (PSW, PNW, Regional Office-Region 6, Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Willamette NF, Deschutes NF, and Wenatchee-Okanogan NF), Oregon Department of Forestry, EPA, Wild Salmon Center, Russian Sakhalin Salmon Initiative, Ecotrust, Sacramento River Exchange, Foothills Model Forest (Alberta Canada),Hayfork Watershed Research Center, Federal Joint Fire Science Program and the private forest industry in the U. S. and Canada.

- For additional information on community based analysis systems, refer to "The Future of Applied Watershed Science at Regional Scales", an article in EOS (American Geophysical Union), May 2009 - located at the bottom of the website's home page.

Uniform watershed attribute databases can enhance communication and problem solving techniques among communities of stakeholders