SC-SELECT: SOUTH CAROLINA SPATIALLY EXPLICIT LOAD ESTIMATION CALCULATION TOOL FOR SOUTH CAROLINA

The development of watershed-based plans are essential to addressing the root cause of impaired waters and protecting the overall health of watersheds. Watershed-based plans are intended to identify pollutants and recommend best management practices to address impairments. Two of the required elements of a watershed-based plan include 1) identifying potential sources of pollution, and 2) estimating load reductions from project implementation. A variety of tools exist to help with these elements, although few include estimates for bacteria loading, and none are specific to South Carolina. Fecal coliform bacteria is the most common cause of impairments in South Carolina; to ensure the success of watershed-based plans, better tools are needed to estimate bacteria loading.

SC SELECT, the South Carolina Spatially Explicit Load Enrichment Calculation Tool, is a new web-based GIS tool which can be used to estimate the bacteria pollution loading rate of point and non-point sources in South Carolina at the county and HUC-12 watershed scale. The tool assists watershed planners by estimating all existing bacteria sources within a selected watershed or a selected county. SC SELECT will provide a tool to improve accuracy and consistency when identifying potential bacteria sources for watershed-based plans and estimating load reductions from best management practice implementation. This tool is in the final phases of beta testing and a version of the tool is already available to the public.