Managing water resources using WebGIS; development and application of an ArcGIS Explorer toolkit for McHenry County

Managing Water Resources Using WebGIS: Development and Application of an ArcGIS Explorer Toolkit for McHenry County Yi-Chen E. Yang and Yu-Feng F. Lin Illinois State Water Survey Institute of Natural Resources Sustainability University of Illinois Integration of GIS with decision support systems (DSS) for environmental resources management has been a popular issue for more than a decade. A GIS-based DSS permits visualization of considerations pertinent to the decision-making process and allows informed participation by the non-technical decision maker. However, the information and knowledge contained in GIS datasets cannot be fairly and efficiently shared until all interested parties have access to GIS software. This problem has been addressed with the recent release by the Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI) of a free, lightweight GIS browser, ArcGIS Explorer, a development with significant promise for community participation in planning via a GIS-based DSS. The ubiquitous WebGIS Analysis Toolkit for Extensive Resources (uWATER) is an ArcGIS Explorer plug-in package developed by the Illinois State Water Survey for visualizing and analyzing decision support variables such as groundwater modeling results. The uWATER package was coded in Microsoft Visual Basic and designed to utilize the computing capacity of a single laptop computer. This presentation will demonstrate an application using uWATER for groundwater resource management in McHenry County including: 1) visualizing heads computed by a numerical model; 2) computing drawdown; 3) identifying hydrologic assets (such as fish habitats, streams, and wetlands) threatened by pumping. uWATER is free and can be downloaded from http://www.sws.uiuc.edu/gws/sware/uwater/. The download package includes the plug-in program, user's guide, and sample files.