THE SOUTH CAROLINA WATER MONITORING PORTAL

The South Carolina Water Monitoring Portal is an ArcGIS-based geospatial tool that consumes water quality from multiple data depositories for the State of South Carolina and projects onto an interactive map. This tool provides academia, regulatory agencies, and the public with an easy to access tool allowing for the download, upload, and visualization of water quality data for the State of South Carolina. One of the highlights of the tool is that it allows for querying of the data using spatial filters to match the user's needs while maintaining interactive selection of parameters. The tool allows users to download tabular or map passed data in open data formats. This tool is a collaboration between the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium and the Santee Cooper GIS laboratory at the College of Charleston.

The South Carolina Water Monitoring Portal has the potential to aid in source water protection because it makes water quality data much more accessible and engaging for the user. Source water protection is difficult to achieve when the data pertaining to the quality of water in the state is stuck in the "silos" of various agencies. This tool also serves the general public of South Carolina in that it makes water quality data easily accessible to all. Academia and regulatory agencies can use this application to communicate water quality from a spatial viewpoint and potentially foster a better understanding of water quality to stakeholders providing an important tool for outreach and information dissemination. The power of this tool is in its ability to "unpack" this data and make it readily available to everyone in an interactive map-based format.