Challenges for Florida Water Resources Monitoring Council
 

Charges to Council

• Develop water resource metadata standards for adoption by state agencies.
• Support development of a replacement for STORET for sharing WQ data.
• Coordinate Florida's ongoing fresh water monitoring with new coastal monitoring network.
• Coordinate Florida's state monitoring efforts with local and federal monitoring programs.

Council Vision

The Vision of the Florida Water Resources Monitoring Council is to better protect, preserve, manage and restore water resources in the state of Florida by coordinating water resource monitoring and by sharing information. A user-friendly access tool about statewide water resource monitoring programs is implemented and supported. This effort encompasses fresh and salt water resources information. Standardized monitoring program attributes provide an understanding of the purpose, quality and scope of monitoring. Data and metadata are accessible to all users. There are links to other water resource information portals. Communication, cooperation, connectivity and coordination have improved awareness and understanding of water resource monitoring throughout the state.

Data Challenges

• Provide data/information that can be shared with others.
• Collect data that can be combined with that from other programs.
• Adopt means to distinguish data that is appropriate for the users purposes (metadata)

Program Challenges

• Identify and describe present monitoring programs
• Identify where monitoring goals are sufficiently similar to allow coordination of efforts
• Identify if monitoring programs are sufficiently similar that coordination offers a cost benefit
• To fill gaps in monitoring, determine where expansion of existing programs is more cost effective than adding new programs