A water monitoring project in the Columbia Basin is making waves.
Living Lakes Canada launched the Columbia Basin Water Monitoring Framework during summer to understand the impacts of climate change.
Program manager Paige Thurston says the Elk Valley and the Columbia Valley are among the program’s pilot areas.
“The goal of the project is to gain a better understanding of how climate change is impacting water systems in our region,” Thurston says. “So, we need to understand how climate change is affecting water quantity, quality, and timing of flow, in the Columbia Basin to be able to adapt to those changes.”
Thurston says the project aims to understand local priorities.
“Through that we gained a lot of information about the challenges that people are facing in their watersheds in the three pilot areas,” She says. “Solutions that they’re already implementing, ways that they’re protecting their watershed. The other thing we did was conduct a geo spatial data gap analysis. Through that we gained an understanding of what water monitoring is already happening in this region.”
The data collected will be accessible to the public and all levels of government.
Further monitoring will be implemented next year, the project will run over a ten year period.
– Paige Thurston, Columbia Basin Water Monitoring Framework program manager
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