New Dashboard Makes CRWC Data Publicly Available

The Clinton River Watershed Council (CRWC) has been collecting data through our Adopt-a-Stream initiative for more than 20 years. Until this year, that data was only available in reports published once a year, or in hard copies at the CRWC office.

Some of this data is now available in an online tool called the Data Dashboard. The dashboard’s data tracks certain types of macroinvertebrates, or bugs, in the Clinton River and its tributaries, an indicator of the health of the watershed. Dashboard users can investigate trends over time for topics such as macroinvertebrate abundance, diversity and more.

Consolidating the data into a relevant, standardized format is an ongoing project. To date, two years of Adopt-a-Stream data have been entered. Older data will take longer to enter due to a change in the methodology for identifying and scoring macroinvertebrate populations at both the order and family level in 2020. This change, made by the Michigan Clean Water Corps, means that we’ll need to spend considerable time adjusting the data. We anticipate that additional data will start to be available in the dashboard by the end of this year.

We are excited about the dashboard because data accessibility is important to CRWC. We want our data to be readily accessible to residents throughout our watershed. We hope the dashboard will be a resource to the volunteers who collected the data, as well as government agencies, municipalities, university students and professors. You can visit the Data Dashboard yourself at crwc.org/data-dashboard.