The StormWater Management and Planning Tool: Coastal Water Quality Enhancement through the Use of an Internet-Based Geospatial Tool

Abstract

Increasing development of coastal watersheds has altered groundwater and surface runoff patterns, and led to the progressive eutrophication of freshwater tributaries and adjacent coastal waters. Effective and properly engineered stormwater management systems represent one of the most important water resource protection strategies to counter this trend. Geospatial tools are needed to place existing and proposed development and stormwater management system (SWMS) infrastructure into a watershed context. A Geographic Information System (GIS) inventory of the existing SWMS infrastructure is a critical first step. To be most effective, this geospatial inventory, complemented by decision support tools, needs to be user friendly and readily available to a wide audience of target groups. To address this issue, we developed the StormWater Management Planning Tool (SWMPT) as a suite of on-line interactive mapping and query tools to facilitate access to data for display, assessment and analysis purposes needed for stormwater and sediment control. SWMPT is geared to meet the needs of municipalities and counties in planning and managing their SWMS infrastructure and has been implemented for Ocean County, NJ as a pilot project. To ensure that SWMPT met the needs of its identified target audience, a number of county and local partners and prospective end users were involved in the project from its inception through a highly structured design and evaluation process. The SWMPT interactive mapping tool can be accessed through www.BarnegatBayBasins.rutgers.edu.

Keywords:

• geographic information systems
• instructional system design
• stormwater management

Acknowledgments

This project was funded by a grant from NOAA/UNH Cooperative Institute for Coastal and Estuarine Environmental Technology, NOAA Grant Number(s) NA06NOS4190167. We express our sincere appreciation to David Friedman and William Slack of the Ocean County Soils Conservation District for providing access to the stormwater basin files and their office. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Dolores Leonard of the NOAA National Estuarine Research Reserve's Science Collaborative in the development of the YouTube instructional video. We also acknowledge the assistance of Kathleen McCarthy, Steve Zeck, Al Morgan, and Ruth and Dennis Koenig in digitizing and quality checking the stormwater basin records, as well as the assistance of our many focus group and Beta testers. The final version of the article greatly benefited from the comments received from two anonymous reviewers.