Friday, August 07, 2009

Treasure Valley & Boise River Restoration and Recreation GeoWeb Project

Today I wrote the following message to a few people related to the upcoming Idaho Environmental Forum Annual Conference which is showcasing Treasure Valley River Restoration and Recreation projects.

I am including a Google Map here to identify the Geographic places that will be discussed at the conference. I can imagine collaborative maps like these linked together to identify thousands of places where restoration and recreation projects are of interest to citizens who may also want to be involved by submitting photographs, data, or attending decision making decisions.
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My reason for writing this to you now is to suggest the development of an ongoing Geoweb networking project starting during, and continuing after, the Idaho Environmental Forum Conference next week titled: "A River Runs Through It: Showcasing River Restoration and Recreation Projects."
If you have an interest in this development please reply as soon as possible and I will see if this topic can be briefly introduced at the IEF conference next Wednesday August 12.

I will include some background information about this important topic I hope will be helpful to you. Please share this with other people who you think will be interested.

If you have any questions I will be happy to try to answer them.

Regards,

Gary

Gary O. Grimm
Mountain Visions
gogrimm@mountainvisions.com
http://www.mountainvisions.com
Work phone 208-336-2992
Cell phone 208-585-7512
Blog=
http://garyogrimm.blogspot.com


Brief Background and some links of interest. A more complete Biography available upon request.

For many years I have been involved in helping Idaho, northwest and nationwide citizen groups, local organizations, and State and Federal agencies provide rich text, photographic and multimedia information about "geographically located" and "time based" watershed restoration projects. For the past 15 + years many of these efforts have been related to the Internet and the World Wide Web. Many of these web based projects have included opportunities for citizen involvement and engagement.

Over the past few years there has been a tremendous surge in information about web applications that define "The Geospatial Web - How Geobrowsers, Social Software, and the Web 2.0 are shaping the Network Society." This is the title of an important book published in 2007. Many conferences and seminars on related topics are now constantly available worldwide. GeoWeb 2009, Where2.0, Web Squared, and ESRI User Conferences are a few examples. (links below)

Today there is beginning a huge new opportunity for many more citizens who have technical and environmental interests in watersheds to become involved in contributing meta tagged "Citizen Science" and "open source content or data" including photos, GIS data, reports, monitoring studies and other information to appropriate location based or Geoweb sites. As this place and time based information accumulates it will result in the opportunity for any person using the web to locate a wealth of historical and contemporary data about a special place of interest. Citizens with the opportunity to become involved, informed and educated about issues related to these special places will be much better able to actively participate in future decision making processes.

During the past few years I had been attempting to encourage organizers and participants in groups such as the Idaho Environmental Summit and others to develop a system of "Online - All the time" networking discussion efforts related to at least 15 of the major environmental issues discussed during the Summits from 2006-2009. Last fall I produced an Online presentation related to these new Geoweb networking opportunities. This project and my thoughts about it are generally being updated on my Blog, and Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networking pages. Below is a link to the home page of that presentation, which can serve as a guide to initiatives and projects that can be used for a potential broad based Boise River/ Treasure Valley River Geoweb Watershed project.


Below is a link to interactive and community based watershed web site projects I have been involved in. The first link provides links to several dated projects from the past. We are currently working with the River Menders project in Idaho, the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe in Nevada, Jamaica Protected Areas, and the Prince of Wales Island Tongass National Forest in Alaska, and I will provide those links too. I should note we are having current discussions with the Portneuf River Watershed in Pocatello about developing a similar citizen based GeoWeb project as is possible with the Boise River Watershed. I should also mention that we produced the Ridge to Rivers Web site in the year 2000, that could, and should be, updated to include GeoWeb data, discussions and citizen science projects. This could provide a model for other projects throughout the Boise River Watershed.






Portneuf Basin Pulse (The site below contains real time sensor information now for several geographic locations and plans are to more fully develop the web site with many more citizen science location opportunities, geoweb networking, educational programs, etc.)



Below are a few links to the Book and conferences mentioned above:






Many more references and links available upon request. Please comment here or send to my email address noted above.
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