Open-Source Watershed Science
The Challenge
Governments, First Nations, non-profits, and stewardship organizations across British Columbia need reliable ways to understand their watersheds — whether they're planning restoration, assessing fish habitat, monitoring water quality, or responding to climate-driven changes. But the technical barriers are high. Critical information remains scattered across provincial databases, historic archives, and specialized models — difficult to assemble, and hard for the people responsible for a watershed to keep hold of between projects. Our answer is open data, open tools, and field teams who can use them.
Who We Are
Our work combines field biology, spatial data science, and software development to facilitate aquatic ecosystem conservation and restoration — with an emphasis on inclusive engagement and knowledge sharing.
We work alongside stewardship organizations, First Nations and agencies across BC. The work is stream network modelling, floodplain analysis, land cover change detection, nutrient loading, aquatic health monitoring, field programs and interactive online reporting, connected so that provincial data, analysis, field collection and reporting are one workflow.
Our Approach
We understand our well-being as inseparable from the health of the land and waters we work within. When we care for ecosystems, we care for ourselves.
We work in the open because shared methods, shared tools, and shared findings are how we move the needle faster — on conservation and restoration, on understanding, on justice for the places and people we care about.
Our analytical tools, data, and methods are publicly available — so every project strengthens shared tools, and every partnership compounds across watersheds and years.
How It Works
Four questions about a watershed. Open data catalogues feed the analysis, and the analysis becomes the field maps crews carry and the reports partners read.
Where is the habitat, and what is limiting it?
Habitat potential for each species and what limits it: access, flow, temperature and climate. Each species' fish habitat definition starts from its life history and, where the records allow, is tuned on where sampling did and did not find it. Flow for almost every stream, and water temperature at gauging stations, round out the picture.
Where is the floodplain, what did it look like before, and what has changed it?
Where the floodplain is, which parts of it lidar shows are cut off from the river, and how drainage, channelisation, roads, farming and fill have changed it. Historic airphotos show earlier conditions, land-cover change is mapped between years and tagged with what overlaps it, such as fire perimeters or cutblocks, and climate departure shows how far conditions have moved from normal.
What do the ground and water look like now?
Catalogues of BC's lidar and the drone imagery from our programs: pick a place and see which flights cover it, and when, and where it has been flown again, what changed. Water temperature, flow and level from stream gauges, kept month over month. All of it loads straight into models, field maps and reports.
Into the field and back
We take the planning into the field, with a field system for each program: map projects and forms that work offline, shared by the whole crew. Each fish passage and restoration project becomes an open online report.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Long-term programs that use these tools today: delivering reports, building field capacity, and improving the tools with every season.
Watershed Restoration & Conservation
Aquatic restoration planning, delivery and monitoring across British Columbia — from the Neexdzii Kwah watershed restoration framework to fish passage assessment across the Skeena, Peace and Fraser regions and the Elk River.
Explore →Aquatic Monitoring & Assessment
Nutrient loading analysis for Kootenay Lake and Arrow Lakes Reservoir. Benthic community health assessment. Kokanee stock assessment. Decades of monitoring data integrated into reproducible workflows.
Explore →Open Source Software
Habitat, floodplains and how land use has changed them, and open catalogues of lidar, drone imagery and stream data, with the code to build them. Each partnership extends them. Built in the open wherever transparency improves science.
Explore →Our analytical tools and methods are public. Transparent, reproducible, and built to share.
VIEW ON GITHUB